Chapter 8 - The Severance
Outside the courtroom, the hallway marble gleamed under the harsh lights.
Daniel, Marisol, and I were walking toward the elevators when two figures stepped out from the shadows near the public restrooms.
Tomas and Elena.
My father looked like an old, broken derelict. He wore the rumpled tweed coat he had grabbed from the house, his shirt stained with coffee, his eyes bloodshot and swollen from days of crying. Elena clung to his arm, looking terrified, clutching a worn vinyl purse to her chest.
"Anna," Tomas croaked, taking a shuffling step toward me, his hands outstretched in supplication. "Anna, baby... thank God. We saw the news. We saw they locked him up."
Daniel immediately stepped in front of me, his broad frame shielding me from our parents. "Back up, Tomas."
"Daniel, please!" Elena wept, dabbing at her red nose with a crumpled tissue. "We’re your parents! We’re a family! You can't let them throw us out on the street! The motel in Hackensack is costing us a hundred dollars a night, and all our savings were tied up in the Ridgewood accounts that the bank froze!"
Tomas looked past Daniel’s shoulder, his eyes pleading, desperate, and entirely devoid of shame. "Anna... Victor's assets are going to be divided in the divorce, right? Chen said you're entitled to the marital settlement and the whistleblower reward from the IRS! Anna, you're going to get millions! You have to buy back the Ridgewood house for us! We did everything for you, Anna! We gave you to him so you'd have a good life!"
We gave you to him.
The words hung in the sterile air between us. He didn't even realize what he had just admitted. To him, I had never been a daughter with a beating heart; I had been a commodity to be traded for financial comfort.
I stepped around Daniel, placing a hand gently on my brother's arm to let him know I was alright.
I looked at Tomas. I looked at Elena. I searched inside myself for rage, for hatred, for the bitter poison that had consumed me during those freezing nights in Danbury.
There was nothing. Only a vast, clean emptiness.
"I am not buying your house, Tomas," I said, my voice quiet, even, and absolute.
"Anna!" Elena gasped, clutching her chest. "How can you be so cruel? We gave you life!"
"You sold my life," I replied. "When Victor pushed my head into that brass latch and broke my ribs, I came to your doorstep bleeding. You closed the door in my face and told me to be a better wife so your mortgage wouldn't bounce."
Tomas’s face flushed a deep, ugly red. "I was trying to protect this family!"
"You were protecting yourself," I said. "Daniel is my family. Lily is my family. Marisol is my family. You two are just the people who rented me out to a monster."
I reached into my handbag, pulled out a cashier's check for five thousand dollars—money Marisol had helped me secure from my personal emergency fund—and laid it on the marble bench beside the elevators.
"That will cover your motel and a rental deposit on a one-bedroom apartment in Paterson," I said. "That is the absolute last cent you will ever receive from me. If you ever come near Lily, if you ever show up at her school, or if you ever contact me again, I will have David Chen file a restraining order against you both before sundown."
"Anna, you can't do this!" Tomas shouted, his voice cracking into that familiar, petulant whine. "You owe us!"
"I owe you nothing," I said, looking him dead in the eye. "My debt to you was paid in blood on Victor Hale’s bathroom floor. We are finished."
The elevator doors chimed and slid open.
May you like
Daniel, Marisol, and I stepped inside. As the brass doors began to slide shut, Tomas lunged forward, his face contorted in frantic, greedy despair, but the stainless steel panels met with a solid, final thud, cutting him off forever.
I turned around in the elevator, looked at my brother, and for the first time in three years, I smiled.
