Chapter 6 - The Visitor in the Rain
Two weeks after the hospital incident, a black sedan pulled up to the curb outside my apartment building during a quiet evening downpour. I looked through the window, my muscles instantly tightening with the old defense mechanisms. I reached for my phone to call Marcus Vance, assuming my mother had broken the protection order.
But it wasn't Loretta who stepped out of the car. It was my father.
He wore an old, faded raincoat, his hair soaked through, looking smaller than I had ever seen him. He didn't try to come upstairs. He just stood by the buzzer in the lobby until I went down to meet him, leaving Piper safely with our neighbor upstairs.
"Emily," he said, his voice cracking as he took off his wet cap. He didn't try to hug me. He knew he hadn't earned that right. "I brought you this."
He handed me a large, yellow manila envelope. Inside were the original deeds to the small parcel of land my grandfather had left behind—the land my mother had threatened to write me out of if I didn't give up my kidney.
"I transferred it directly into your name today," my father said, staring at his boots. "Your mother doesn't know. She’s spending all her time with James’s defense lawyers, trying to liquidate her own retirement to pay his legal fees. She's ruined, Emily. She's completely consumed by him."
"Why are you giving me this now, Dad?" I asked, holding the heavy envelope against my chest. "Where was this strength when she was shoving the clipboard into my face?"
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He looked up, his eyes filled with a devastating, permanent regret. "Because I was a coward, Emily. I let your mother run the house because it was easier than fighting her. I let her turn you into the sacrifice so James could be the prince. But when I saw Piper stand in that doorway... I realized that my granddaughter has more courage in her little finger than I’ve had in my entire life. I’m leaving your mother, Emily. I’m moving into a small room near the shipyard."
I looked at my father—a man who had spent thirty years being a ghost in his own home. I didn't forgive him that night. The scars were too deep. But I reached out and touched his wet shoulder. "Take care of yourself, Dad. Don't let them take you down with them."
