Chapter 4 - The Emergency Call
Gwendolyn’s hand was shaking so badly she nearly dropped her ceramic cup onto the welcome mat.
"This is a joke," she hissed, her voice rising in pitch as she stared at the official seals on Marcus’s paperwork. "Some kind of scam! Samuel! Samuel, get out here right now!"
She didn't have to call him twice.
A silver sedan turned abruptly into the driveway behind Marcus’s car, tires crunching sharply against the gravel. Samuel’s Honda Accord cut its engine, and my father scrambled out of the driver's side door, his tie askew, looking like a man who had just received a heart attack diagnosis over his office landline.
"Gwendolyn? What's going on?" Samuel panted, hurrying up the steps, completely ignoring Marcus at first. Then his eyes locked onto me sitting calmly in the passenger seat of Marcus's car across the driveway.
His stride stuttered.
"Paige?" Samuel breathed, staring at me through the windshield as if I were a ghost. "What are you doing here? What is this man doing at our door?"
I didn't roll down the window immediately. I watched him—this man who had traded my peace for his quiet dinners, who had watched his new wife humiliate his daughter and simply told me not to be dramatic.
Marcus turned to face Samuel as he reached the top step.
"Mr. Samuel Vance?" Marcus asked, offering a pristine copy of the trust agreement. "You might want to read page four, section twelve. Specifically the part where you agreed that any attempt by your spouse or dependents to evict the primary beneficiary—Paige Hayes—constitutes an immediate breach of residency, triggering an automatic fifty-thousand-dollar penalty and a twenty-four-hour full property clearance."
Samuel stared at the paper as if it were written in ancient Greek. His lips parted, but no sound came out.
"Fifty thousand...?" Samuel whispered, his voice trembling. "Gwendolyn, what did you do?"
"Me?!" Gwendolyn shrieked, finally losing all semblance of composure as she pointed a manicured finger at her husband. "You told me the house was yours! You said we could do whatever we wanted with the rooms! You never said her dead mother owned the damn deed!"
Chloe burst into tears, her livestream phone still recording the entire disaster, though she frantically tried to kill the broadcast as neighbors began peeking out from behind their curtains across the street.
"Dad, make them go away!" Chloe sobbed, stamping her foot against the porch floor. "Where are we supposed to go?! My room is upstairs! My aesthetic is in that room!"
Samuel looked from his sobbing stepdaughter to his furious wife, and finally, agonizingly, across the yard to me.
His shoulders slumped. All the artificial authority he had carried inside those walls for nine years evaporated in the Arizona heat, leaving behind a broken, defeated man who had finally realized the true cost of his cowardice.
He walked slowly down the front steps, his feet dragging against the stone, and stopped a few feet away from my car door.
May you like
With trembling fingers, he tapped twice on the glass.
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