Chapter 4 - The Midnight Call
Before I could brief Alvarez on our next move, my desk phone finally rang—the direct landline from Long Island.
I picked up the receiver instantly.
"Erica," my father's voice came through the speaker, sounding older, thinner, and utterly exhausted. There was no bombast in his tone now, no protective bluster for Jason. Just a hollow, fractured fatigue.
"I'm here, Dad," I said quietly.
"I saw the broadcast," he said, his voice catching on the words. "For five minutes, all I could look at was that tanker sliding toward you. I thought... I thought I was about to watch my daughter die on national television."
"I'm alive, Dad. The driver made it out too."
A heavy silence stretched across the line, broken only by the crackle of static.
"Jason didn't come home," he whispered. "Clara called the police an hour ago. His car was found abandoned off an interstate exit twenty miles west of the house. His laptop is sitting on the kitchen counter, and the local police are already asking questions because his name appeared on a federal manifest connected to a supply audit out of Norfolk."
My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles turned white. "What kind of audit, Dad?"
Another long pause. When he spoke next, the defensive walls he had built around his family for decades had completely crumbled.
"The kind that destroys careers," he said bitterly. "Jason didn't just get a promotion last month, Erica. He was appointed regional vice president because his firm was handling the quiet disposal of surplus inventory from the western bases. Millions in specialized hardware that was supposed to be decommissioned. Except... the hardware wasn't scrapped. It was being diverted through civilian channels."
"And you knew?" I asked, the words tasting like ash.
"I suspected," my father admitted, his voice breaking. "When I told you not to come home for Christmas... it wasn't because of Jason's promotion, Erica. It was because Jason had come to me a week earlier, terrified. He told me that federal investigators were sniffing around his logistics chain, and that your name had popped up on an internal base rotation list in Colorado. He begged me to keep you away from the house so you wouldn't start asking questions about where his company was getting its money."
The betrayal didn't sting like a slap; it felt like a slow, crushing weight. He hadn't pushed me away to protect Jason's pride. He had pushed me away to protect Jason's crimes, hiding behind the excuse of family harmony while covering up a federal investigation.
"You traded me away to keep him safe," I said, my voice dangerously steady.
"I was trying to protect my family," he pleaded.
"You had two children, Dad," I replied softly. "You just picked the wrong one."
May you like
I hung up the phone before he could answer.
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