Page 116 of This Life of Mine

And Lina, fully informed, is far more threatening than she has ever been before.

Chapter thirty-six

Lina

Idon’t think I breathe for a full minute after Alex tells me everything.

Five million, every five years.For life.

It doesn’t make sense. None of it does. My mind keeps circling, searching for a crack in the logic, a misunderstanding. Anything to make this seem less surreal.

Because all I can see is Virginia. Sweet, gentle Virginia.

For fifteen years, I loved that woman without expectation. I never wanted her money or needed her approval. In a family where kindness was scarce, Virginia gave it freely. She never saw me as the poor girl Cole married. Never spoke to me with pity or condescension. Never let me believe I was anything less than worthy.

She saw me.

When she got sick, bedbound, I went to visit her every day. Not out of obligation but out of love. I’d sit beside her and gossip about anything and everything, mainly celebrity gossip. Show her IG videos she didn’t understand but laughed at.

We’d whisper about family drama and mundane things like it was our own little world.

She never once looked at me like a burden.

She was the one who encouraged me to go to business school. Told me I was wasting my life by shrinking myself to fit Cole’s insecurities. She said it to his face once, too. He hated it. The tension afterward was unbearable.

That was the worst time for me while with Cole. The abuse that came quietly, constantly, wrapped in intimidation and humiliation. Emotional and mental. All because I wanted to educate myself.

But I pushed through.

When I filed for divorce, I already had my bachelor’s degree. I was on my way to earning my MBA. I was becoming someone Cole couldn’t cage anymore.

Virginia was proud of me.

After the trust money came—money I never asked for, never expected—I tried to give it back. I told her I couldn’t justify keeping something that belonged to the Allister family.

But Virginia had only looked at me over the rim of her teacup and said, “Then you still don’t understand why I gave it to you.”

At the time, I didn’t.

I thought the trust was about legacy. The Allister name. Bloodlines. Wealth protecting wealth.

But it wasn’t. Not really.

Virginia believed motherhood changed a woman in ways the world refused to respect. She used to say pregnancy was the most vulnerable a woman would ever be—physically, emotionally, financially—and that vulnerability only became more dangerous when the wrong man stood beside her.

She knew because she’d lived it.

Before Cole’s father David was born—before the polished country club marriage and the carefully curated familyreputation—Virginia lost two pregnancies. Late enough to dream about the future. Late enough to bury those dreams.

She rarely talked about it directly, but when she did, her voice always changed. Softer. Distant. Like part of her stayed buried with them.

And when she carried a pregnancy to term—her only surviving child David—she clung to motherhood like it was oxygen. David became her entire world.

Sadly, her husband never understood any of it.

Her grief after the miscarriages.

The fear during pregnancy.