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Fallon Carrington turns her key into the large wooden, oak door of her lavish home, stepping in to the foyer after her long, ten hour work day, ready to squeeze her daughters tightly against her chest and curl up with them on the couch for the night watching their favorite TV shows.
And maybe give her husband a kiss, too, but mostly she just wants to see her girls.
She slips off her red Gucci heels by the entrance, her bare feet hitting the cold tiled floor, immediately feeling the pain start to dissipate in her feet from walking on them all day. She can already hear the commotion coming from the kitchen just down the hall, Liam no doubt at work on their family dinner for the evening, so she lets her feet slide against the cool floor and take her in the direction of the soft sounds coming from her left.
But something catches her eye when she walks by their family room.
She pauses in her tracks and backtracks looking at the television hanging on the wall above the fireplace. The television…it’s not the television that was in the room when she left the house this morning. It’s larger, much larger, than the television she remembers picking out with her husband.
“You didn’t tell me you were getting a bigger TV, Liam,” she says when she steps into the kitchen, the smell of caramelized onions filling the open space. She saunters up to her husbands side to press a quick kiss against his lips, careful to not disturb his cooking.
“What? I didn’t,” he says, looking up from his pan where four golden brown chicken breasts were sitting against a low flame. “I thought you ordered it and were trying to surprise me or something.”
“No. It wasn’t me.” Fallon moves towards the stainless steel refrigerator to pull out a bottle of water. “So, if it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t you…”
“You don’t think….” Liam looks up at his wife, a look of horror appearing in his eyes as she watches his wheels start turning and thinking of the only other possible culprit who placed that order.
Her head tilts to her side, her thoughts catching up with his as her eyes go wide in realization as to exactly who their little criminal is here.
“Hey, Charlotte!” Liam yells out to his daughter, who was only a few rooms away from them playing in their daughters’ playroom. “Kitchen, now!”
“Hi mommy! Hi, daddy!” The tiny voice is heard before her soft brown curls are seen turning the corner into the kitchen, her bright smile almost distracting Fallon from the matter at hand here. “Did you have a nice day at work today, mommy?”
“Hey, babygirl,” Fallon says softly, her daughters small hand wrapping around her body in a tight hug which she happily returns back to the small girl. “Daddy and I just wanted to ask you if you noticed anything different about the television in the living room today?”
“No, it doesn’t look any different to me,” Charlotte’s tiny shoulders shrug, sitting herself against one of the barstools opposite her dad operating the stove. “Why would you ask such a silly question?”
Liam turns the stove off, arms folding against his chest in his tight fitted blue flannel as he looks Charlotte directly across from him. “It doesn’t look, say, twenty inches bigger to you today?”
“No, daddy!” The giggle that erupts their first born is so infectious, her smile wide and beaming as she looks at both her parents with such adoration. “Why would you say that?!”
“So, you’re telling me that if I were to check your mothers’ Amazon account right now, we wouldn’t find that the television currently in our living room was ordered under our account, would we?”
Her tiny shoulders fall up and down again, her wavy hair rising and falling with her. “I don’t think so, daddy!”
Liam’s eyes don’t leave Charlotte’s small body when he says, “Check your recent orders, Fallon.”
“No!” The small brunettes eyes go wide when she lets out a little peep. “There’s no reason to do that!”
Fallon slips her phone out of her pant pocket, opening the app in question with just a few maneuvers to her screen. She clicks around, finding her recent orders list when she finds the answer she’s looking for and her eyes go wide when she takes in what she’s looking at.
“Oh my god,” she mutters, eyes moving towards her daughter still keeping up her innocent act, grinning like she did nothing wrong. “Charlotte, do you mind telling us how you ordered an 85 inch television under my account without knowing the passcode to my phone?”
“I suppose…” Charlotte’s smile begins to fall, the facade unraveling before her. She sees the wheels turning in her daughters mind, trying to figure out how to tell her and Liam the truth. Or if she knows her daughter like she thinks she does, how to keep the lie up even longer. “It’s a possibility that I might have added my face to the facial ID recognition so it would open for me when I needed to use it.”
“Hold this, Charlie,” Fallon hands her daughter her current iPhone before coming ‘round to stand directly behind the young Ridley. “Liam, can you press the side button for me?”
She watches as her husband comes ‘round and does exactly as she instructed him to do. Her screen lights up brightly, her wallpaper of their family portrait coming into view as her phone unlocks right before her eyes for the tiny face looking straight into the camera lens.
“Unbelievable, you are, Charlotte,” Fallon says, stealing her phone back from her eldest. “How did you even manage to get into my phone in the first place without a passcode?”
“You left it unlocked one day, so I went in and added my face!”
“I never leave my phone unlocked,” Fallon says, trailing her eyes in on the eight year old in front of her. “Your dad likes to go through my photos way too much.”
“Okay, so that might have been a tiny white lie,” she responds. “But. it wasn’t hard to figure out all I needed to do was type my birthday!”
Liam pulls the phone from his wife’s hand and starts scrolling through the recent orders that are still visible on her LCD screen. “Can I ask how you’re planning on paying your mom back for the 85 inch television, the Mickey Mouse waffle maker, and the Cinderella Castle Lego set?”
“I have money from my stocks, dad,” she says, her piercing ocean blue eyes rolling back into her head.
“That’s….” Liam trails off. “Charlotte, that isn’t the point here.”
“But you asked how I’d pay you back? I’m just telling you that I can!”
Liam places her phone back in the palm of her hand as he continues talking with their daughter. “And that’s still not enough to cover all the things you ordered, Charlie.”
“What?”
“Maybe if you’d hadn’t sold some of your investments last month because you wanted to buy that new Gucci belt to match your mothers’,” Liam shrugs with his response. “I believe we’re gonna have to take the money from your college trust fund if you don’t have enough to pay your mother back right now.”
“What?” Fallon watches as the panic sets into her daughter cerulean blue orbs, the weight of what her father just told her becoming a very real reality. “But that’s my money for Harvard!”
“Well, maybe you should have thought of that before you ordered all that stuff online without asking our permission.”
Charlotte’s sad expression further deepens, letting her dads words continue to sink in. “Does that mean I can’t go to Harvard anymore?”
Liam only shrugs, even as they both watch on as Charlotte’s eyes start to pool with tears. “I’m afraid so.”
“No, daddy! Please!” Her tiny cries are loud and pleading. Her daughter always did have a flare for the dramatics. “I will sell all of my stuff - even my stocks! I will get a job and I can do all the chores in the house! But, please don’t take away my money for Harvard!” The tears come for real this time, salty little drops of liquid trailing down her cheek as she stands her little body up before throwing herself against the tiled floor. “Please, daddy! Please!”
“Charlotte,” Fallon says softly, bending down to rub her hand on her daughters arm. She helps lift her little girl up, settling her small body back on the barstool.
“Maybe it’s time you pick a school around here as a backup.” Liam spends his body around to grab three white plates from the cupboard, setting them against the counter top and starting to plate their meal.
“No, daddy! I will not give up Harvard!”
“Boston is thousands of miles away, anyways,” Fallon chimes in. “You really think you can live without us?”
“Oh, please,” she says. “I think it’s you two who can’t live without me.”
“Maybe that’s true,” Liam cuts in. “But we’re not going to order anything on our credit cards again without our permission, right?”
“No,” Charlotte’s voice is soft and disappointed. “I won’t, daddy. I promise. And I’ll pay you back! I promise!”
“That’s my girl,” Fallon says, ruffling her fingers through Charlotte’s brown hair.
“I just have one other question, Charlie,” Liam starts speaking while pulling the roasted potatoes out of the oven. “How did you even get that television installed? There’s no way you did that yourself.”
“What if I said I did do it all by myself?”
Liam narrows his eyes in on his daughter, not buying her words, despite how confident she sounded. “I wouldn’t believe you.”
“Fine! You beat me down!” Her arms flail out to the side, Fallon doing her best to keep the laugh that wants to escape her inside. Because as funny as her daughter was, they were trying to discipline her and she didn’t need to know they found her actions funny. It’d only encourage her more. “Uncle Sam came over and helped me in exchange for our old TV!”
Fallon’s eyes narrow in on her daughter after those words. “Excuse me?”
Charlotte only shrugs as her plate of food is placed in front of her. “It was a fair deal, if you ask me.”
“You gave our TV away?”
She bites into the cauliflower floret on her plate, chewing on the vegetable when she says, “I bought us a new one!”
“Correction, we bought us a new one,” Liam says while getting his and Fallon’s plate prepared.
“Well, I had to give him something for his work!”
“Charlotte, you can’t just…”
“Sorry to interrupt here.”
Fallon looks up at the entry to the kitchen when she hears their housecleaner’s voice from behind her. “Is everything okay, Paula?”
“I was just wondering…where should I tell the delivery driver at the door to put the new hot tub you both had ordered?”