Chapter 10 - The Broken Mask
The silence in my office was deafening.
I stared at Shay as the pieces of a six-year puzzle clicked into place with horrifying clarity.
When I met Darcy seven years ago, he had presented himself as a noble, devoted single father who had sacrificed everything for his daughter. He claimed his ex-wife had run off to Europe, leaving him with mounting medical debts and legal bills. I had felt so much empathy for him. I admired his devotion. When we married, I told him I would shoulder the financial burden of Shay's education so he could finally breathe and rebuild his savings.
He hadn't rebuilt his savings.
He had stolen his own daughter's trust fund to pay off his bad investments, gambled on failed speculative properties, and then smoothly transferred Shay's entire financial dependence onto me to keep his crime from ever being discovered.
"He told me the account was lost in a market crash," Shay wept, her head in her hands. "He swore my mom’s family ruined him in court. The aid officer showed me the signature stamps, Elena. Dad liquidated the account in cash."
I stood up, walked around my desk, and handed her a box of tissues.
"Where is your biological mother now, Shay?" I asked quietly.
"She lives in Seattle," Shay choked out. "I haven't spoken to her in six years. The last thing I said to her on my seventeenth birthday was that I hated her and never wanted to see her again, because Dad told me she was trying to sue to take my college fund away. It was all him. Everything he ever told me was a lie."
She looked up at me, completely shattered. The spoiled, arrogant girl from Sunday dinner was gone. In her place was a young woman who had just realized that the architect of her entire life—the man she had worshipped and defended against the world—was a fraud who had used her as a human shield.
"I'm sorry," Shay whispered, weeping openly. "I said those things to you at dinner because Dad pulled me aside in the hallway right before we ate. He told me you were trying to control him. He told me you were threatening to kick us both out because you thought his family was beneath you. He told me... he told me I needed to stand up to you and remind you who came first."
A cold, deadly calm washed over me.
"Get your things, Shay," I said quietly, picking up my car keys.
May you like
"Where are we going?"
"We are going home," I replied. "It's time your father had his final dinner."
