Chapter 5
The room seemed to lose all air.
Margaret’s knees buckled, and she collapsed back into the nearest dry chair, staring at the shattered table in horror. "Richard... tell me this isn't true. Tell me she doesn't own the roof over our heads."
Richard didn't answer his wife. He stared at Emma with naked, venomous hatred, his chest heaving inside his navy blazer. "You planned this. You brought that card tonight to bait me."
"I brought my daughter here because she loved her father, and she thought her father’s family loved her," Emma said, her voice cracking with profound disgust. "She spent three weeks painting that card for you, Richard. She practiced her cursive every single evening at the kitchen table. And you slammed her head into a piece of wood and called her a beggar."
"She is an interloper!" Richard snarled, abandoning all pretense of civility. "Julian was supposed to marry Katherine Vance! He was supposed to merge our firms! Instead, he brought home an orphaned girl from upstate with no pedigree and no money! You stole my son from me!"
"Julian ran from you because you are a monster," Emma fired back, stepping through the spilled cranberry sauce, stopping only three feet from the patriarch. "He saw what you did to this family. He saw the cruelty you disguised as discipline. He spent his entire adult life trying to wash your stain out of his blood."
"Get out," Richard whispered, his face inches from hers, spitting the words. "Get out before I do something you will truly regret."
Emma laughed—a short, bitter, fearless sound that echoed through the grand dining room. "You still don't understand the situation you are in, old man. I am not the one who is leaving tonight."
Daniel stepped forward, trying to insert himself between them. "Emma, be reasonable! It's Christmas Eve! Where the hell are we supposed to go in a blizzard?!"
"I don't care if you sleep in the snowbank by the highway, Daniel," Emma said without looking at him. "You sat there and watched your father assault my nine-year-old child. You watched her fall and you checked your watch. You have no humanity, and you have no home."
Right on cue, the distant, rhythmic crunch of heavy tires against fresh gravel vibrated through the floorboards.
May you like
Outside the bay windows, through the swirling white snow, two pairs of high-intensity halogen headlights cut through the darkness, illuminating the grand circular driveway of the estate.
Daniel rushed to the frost-covered glass, wiping the condensation away with his sleeve. His face drained of what little color remained. "Dad... there are three black SUVs outside. And a commercial moving truck."
