Page 37 of Her Football Star Ex

“The pancake’s ready to flip,” Jaxon said, startling me.

I jumped and dropped my phone onto the counter.

“Oops, Mommy.” Jaxon laughed, apparently thinking it was funny. “You dropped your phone. You’re silly.”

“I need to be more careful, huh?” I forced a smile and quickly helped him flip the pancake over. Then I went back to watching the video again.

Who was that?I wondered as I watched the dark figure repeat what I’d just seen.

The person didn’t seem too tall, maybe an inch or two taller than me, but it did look like a male physique under the baggy sweater. His shoulders weren’t that broad though, so maybe it was a high schooler playing a prank?

“I’m going to go check something at the front door real quick,” I told Jaxon after grabbing him a plate for his pancake. “I’ll be right back.”

When I opened the door, I instantly jumped back, because lying right there on the welcome mat was a creepy-looking porcelain doll with a note attached with a rubber band to its chest, which said, “You ruined my life. I’m going to ruin yours.”

13

Emerson

“What’s going on here?”Janet Lake, Vincent’s mother, asked when she stormed into my house two hours after I found the doll on my doorstep.

As soon as I’d realized what I was looking at and what it might mean, I had immediately locked my front door, ran through the whole house like a madwoman and made sure all of the doors and windows were locked. Then I called the police.

Three police cars were at my house ten minutes later and a search of the property and security footage was done. I’d had the foresight to tuck Jaxon away in my bedroom to watch Netflix and eat his breakfast before the police showed up, so thankfully, he didn’t realize that I was in panic mode.

I had just finished answering all of the police officers’ questions when my ex-mother-in-law and Vincent’s sister Arianna stepped into the kitchen.

“Why are the police here?” Arianna asked me when I didn’t answer her mother’s question. “Is Jaxon hurt? Are you okay?”

I drew in a deep breath and looked at the women who I used to call family. Janet was in her fifties, her hair in a pixie cut and as dark as Vincent’s. Arianna was just a year younger than me and she had long dark hair, perfect cheekbones, and ultra-long legs that made her look like she belonged on the runway at a fashion show.

“We’re okay,” I told them. “Jaxon is watching a movie in my room.”

“Then what the heck is going on?” Janet asked.

“Someone dropped off a creepy doll and a threatening note on my doorstep last night, so I called the police to tell them about it.”

Since Sutton Creek was such a small town, with rarely anything exciting going on, all three of the on-duty cops had shown up to help me out.

“What?” Janet and Arianna shouted at the same time.

“Someone left a doll and a note on your door?” Arianna asked.

I nodded and creepy chills raced down my spine as the image of the doll popped into my mind again.

Thank goodness the police had taken that disturbing thing with them.

“Do you know who left it?” Janet asked. “Did you catch them on that fancy doorbell camera you have?”

I shook my head. “The perpetrator was wearing a gorilla mask in the video. So we don’t have much to go on. For all I know it could just be bored high school kids trying to stir up some trouble for fun.”

I really had no idea.

Yes, I was a lawyer and had investigated weird situations before, but nothing like this had ever happened to me.

When we bought this house, we hadn’t thought that we needed to put in the huge security gates, because this was Sutton Creek. It was my hometown, and everyone knew everyone. The police literally did sit around drinking coffee most of the time because dangerous things just didn’t happen here.

But could that be changing?

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