Chapter 7 - The Deposition and the Last Stand
Two months later.
The preliminary hearings had begun at the county courthouse.
My father’s high-priced defense lawyers from Columbus had filed motion after motion trying to get the charges reduced, trying to claim that the evidence was gathered illegally, trying to push for a private settlement.
Rebecca Vance rejected every single offer.
"We are going to trial," Rebecca told me in the attorney consultation room before my formal deposition. "Unless they plead guilty to every single count and accept maximum prison sentences, we are putting them in front of a jury."
"I want to testify," I said firmly.
Clara and Rebecca both looked at me with surprise.
"Emma," Rebecca warned gently, "testifying means sitting twenty feet away from your father and mother. It means their defense attorney will cross-examine you. He will try to pick apart your memory. He will try to make you cry."
"I spent nineteen years crying in the dark," I said, looking Rebecca straight in the eye. "I'm done crying. I want them to hear my voice."
An hour later, I stepped into the formal deposition room.
Sitting at the far end of the long mahogany table were my parents and their two defense attorneys.
My father was wearing a cheap grey prison suit, his hands restrained by a belly chain. He looked older, smaller, his face lined with deep stress. My mother sat beside him, stripped of her expensive jewelry and makeup, looking bitter, hollow, and defeated.
When I walked in, wearing a neat navy blue dress with my hair pulled back, my father snapped his head up. His eyes flashed with a flicker of his old, intimidating glare.
In the past, that look would have made me drop my eyes and tremble.
Today, I held his gaze without flinching.
I took my seat at the head of the table beside Rebecca Vance. A court reporter sat beside us, her fingers hovering over the stenography machine.
"State your name for the record," the defense attorney began, adjusting his glasses.
"Emma Rose Carter," I said, my voice clear, strong, and echoing through the room.
"Miss Carter," the defense attorney said, leaning forward on his elbows. "In your statement to police, you claim that on the night of February 12th, your parents purposefully locked you out in the rain after you suffered accidental burns. Isn't it true that you had a violent argument with your mother regarding your academic performance?"
"It was not an argument," I replied calmly. "My mother grabbed my arm while I was screaming in pain from boiling water. She pressed her fingers directly into my second-degree burns, mocked me, and then my father threw me out the back door into thirty-degree rain."
The defense attorney frowned. "And you claim this was part of a 'pattern of abuse'? Yet for nineteen years, you never filed a police report. You never told a school counselor. You never told a doctor."
"Because my father told me he owned the sheriff," I answered flatly, looking directly at my father. "And he was right. Because every time a neighbor called CPS, my father paid off the officers to make the reports disappear. Because my mother told me that if I spoke a word, she would make sure I ended up in an institution."
My father slammed his chained hands onto the table with a loud clank.
"You ungrateful little bitch!" he snarled, his voice booming across the room. "After everything we gave you! We gave you a home! We paid for your clothes! We kept a roof over your head!"
"With my own money!" I shouted back, standing up from my chair and leaning over the table, my voice ringing with absolute authority. "You stole eleven thousand dollars of my earnings! You ran up forty thousand dollars of debt in my name! You didn't give me a home—you gave me a prison!"
"Mr. Carter, control your client or I will have him removed!" the magistrate warned sternly.
My mother suddenly burst into fake, dramatic tears. "Emma, please! We are your parents! We loved you! We were just strict because we wanted you to succeed! How can you do this to your own mother?!"
I looked at my mother—the woman who had smiled while her husband threw me out into the freezing rain, the woman who had burned my skin with curling irons and covered it up with foundation.
"You were never my mother," I said, my voice dropping into a cold, quiet register that cut through her fake weeping. "A mother protects her child. You were just my warden. And your prison is officially closed."
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Silence descended over the room.
My father stared at me, his mouth open, realizing for the very first time that the scared little girl he had beaten into submission no longer existed. In her place stood a woman who held his entire future in her hands—and she was not going to show him a single grain of mercy.
