Chapter 5 - The Eviction Notice
My father slumped down onto the sofa, the fifty-pound weight of his ego crashing down around his ears. He looked ten years older in a matter of seconds, his broad shoulders caving inward.
“Clara... please,” my father stammered, his voice losing all its bluster, turning into a pathetic, desperate whine. “We’re your parents. You can’t just... you can’t throw us out on the street! Where would we go? Brooke, Ethan—they live here now!”
I turned slowly, looking down at my sister Brooke, whose superior smirk had completely vanished, replaced by a look of sheer, unadulterated terror.
“Ask Brooke,” I said calmly. “She’s the one who needed the emergency business bailout for her husband. She’s the one who convinced you to leverage the house equity while my daughter was dying of lung failure in a hospital bed.”
Brooke stepped forward, her face flushing crimson with rage. “You bitch! You’ve been plotting this behind our backs while we were trying to live our lives! You have no heart!”
“Heart?” I laughed—a sharp, cold sound that made everyone in the room flinch. “You want to talk to me about heart? Where was your heart when you sold Lily’s bed while she was still hooked to oxygen tubes? Where was your heart when you told my eight-year-old child that her room belonged to Ethan because she was ‘costing too much money’?”
I stepped closer to Brooke, invading her space until she instinctively shrank back.
“You wanted my space,” I whispered. “Now you can have the whole house. Because starting tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, the locks are being changed, the sheriff’s eviction notice is being filed, and every single piece of furniture in this house—starting with that flat-screen TV—is going up for public auction to satisfy the debt you owe me.”
“You can’t do that!” my mother shrieked, bursting into real, ugly tears, clutching at her chest. “We raised you! We fed you!”
“You kept me alive long enough to exploit me,” I corrected her, my voice dropping an octave, ringing with absolute finality. “And now, the bill is due.”
I turned toward the front door, pulling my jacket tighter against the spring chill. I paused with my hand on the brass doorknob and looked back one last time at the people who thought they had broken me.
They had gone completely pale, staring at me as if I were an executioner who had just walked through their front door.
“Pack your bags,” I said. “You have forty-eight hours.”
May you like
I pulled the door open, stepped out into the bright spring sunshine, and walked down the steps. My car engine roared to life on the first turn. As I drove away, I didn't look back in the rear-view mirror.
For the first time in my life, the road ahead was entirely mine.
