Page 61 of Happily Ever After

Maude scrolled back through the timestamps. She’d set the searches to find dissolved nonprofits, paused community initiatives, homeowner associations that had gone “inactive.” Darcy hadn’t started these groups. She’d arrived after they’d found their footing.

Maude made some notes and followed the trail.

One organization led to another. A women’s professional network that folded after a bylaws dispute. A neighborhood arts collective that stopped their program after “governance concerns.” A residents committee in another community that never made it past its second year.

Something inside Maude revved up, the same way it did when she and her crew were about to take down an orc battalion.

She clicked into archived meeting minutes from one group and scanned until a phrase caught her eye. Concerns regarding fairness and access. She searched the document for Darcy’s name.

There it was. Then in another tab. And another group. Different minutes. Same concern.

Maude sat back and stared at the open pages, resisting the urge to jump ahead. This wasn’t just a single document. It was a slew of them. More than enough to be a pattern.

Darcy didn’t directly blow things up. But she slowed them down enough to drain momentum and create obstacles until people were too tired to keep going. She got her way through persistence. Like a steady drip that wore a hole in a rock.

Maude highlighted a line and copied it into the document she was building. Procedural pressure precedes collapse. She stared at that, then added another beneath it. Always framed as procedural. Never personal.

The searches had done exactly what she’d hoped they would. They hadn’t handed her an answer, but they’d shown her the patterns she was looking for were there.

She leaned closer to the screen, eyes moving back and forth between dates and names, the outline of it finally coming into focus. Darcy definitely had a method for dealing with things she didn’t like. Or people.

And Paige, without ever meaning to, had become the latest obstacle in Darcy’s way.

What Maude hadn’t found yet was context.

So she worked backward.

She pulled up more archived web pages, sites that no longer existed except in fragments, frozen snapshots of moments in time. She scrolled through meeting minutes from old homeowner associations, community groups, neighborhood committees. She skimmed newsletters that stopped mid-year, social media pages that went quiet without explanation.

Darcy’s name appeared again and again. Not everywhere. But consistently.

Maude made notes, opened another tab, and cross-referenced dates.

She noticed how often Darcy joined things that were established. Rarely anything new. Never anything she’d built herself. She attached herself to momentum that already existed and then…stayed just long enough to leave a mark.

Or cause destruction.

Maude leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing as she reread a paragraph from an old committee update. She picked up the same phrases. A “temporary pause” in programming. A “restructuring period.” Always with a promise to return stronger.

Except they never did.

She followed the trail further back. Another group in a different city, but it was the same language. Inclusivity. Fairness. Transparency.

Words that sounded great until they were used like weapons.

Maude clicked into an old nonprofit filing, brows lifting slightly. The organization had been dissolved quietly after a financial review. Nothing criminal, exactly. Just…questions. Funds had been redirected, budgets amended. And the board had been reshuffled and then disbanded.

Darcy had been on that board.

Maude sucked in a breath and wiggled to sit straighter. She read everything twice. Double-checked the sources. She made notes in her document, drawing lines between dates, highlighting the familiar phrases.

This wasn’t about money, she realized. Not directly. But it was about leverage.

Darcy had a pattern of positioning herself as necessary to whatever group or committee or board she joined. But she didn’t lead, she regulated. She wasn’t there to inspire, she was there to restrict.

And when she lost control because the group resisted, or the founder refused to step aside, or someone dared to argue a different way, things got ugly.

Not publicly. Darcy was too careful for that. Most of the time. What she did was accomplished quietly enough to destabilize whatever she could no longer dominate.