Chapter 4 - The Broken Father
By Sunday morning, the rain had set in, washing away the chalk marks the crime scene investigators had left on the garage driveway. The party tents on Dad’s lawn had collapsed under the downpour, the red and white streamers soaked and tangled in the hydrangeas like discarded bandages.
I discharged myself against medical advice. The hospital staff wanted me to stay another forty-eight hours for observation, but there was no world in which I would allow Dad to wake up in a strange house, confused and alone, without me there to anchor him.
Julian’s home was an old Victorian on the north side of the square, surrounded by towering oaks. When I entered the sunroom, wrapped in an oversized knit sweater to hide the heavy bandages around my torso, Dad was sitting by the French doors. A wool blanket rested over his lap, and a cold cup of chamomile tea sat untouched on the side table.
He looked smaller. In the span of forty-eight hours, the proud man who had built half the stone chimneys in this county seemed to have shrunk into his own clothes. His white hair was uncombed, and his gaze was fixed on the raindrops racing down the glass pane.
"Dad?" I said softly, stepping into the room.
He turned slowly. When his eyes found my face—the dark purple swelling over my cheekbone, the butterfly stitches across my brow—his lower lip began to tremble. A sound escaped his chest, a broken, whistling sob that tore through me more violently than Derek’s fists had.
"Elaine..." he whispered, his hands shaking as he reached out toward me. "Look at what they did to my girl. Look at what they did to you."
I crossed the room, dropped carefully to my knees beside his chair, and buried my face in his wool blanket, ignoring the sharp pain in my ribs. Dad’s hands, rough and calloused from decades of masonry and timber work, rested on my hair.
"Julian told me," Dad whispered, his voice cracking with old age and bottomless grief. "He tried to soften it, but I’m not a fool. My mind may wander, Elaine, but I know what evil looks like. They locked you in the car. My boys. The boys I taught to fish. The boys whose skinned knees I bandaged."
"It wasn't your fault, Dad," I choked out, tears soaking through his trousers. "You gave them everything. You gave them every opportunity."
"No," Dad said, his voice hardening with an unexpected, ancient strength that made me look up. "I gave them too much. I forgave Mark when he stole the truck when he was seventeen. I paid off Derek’s bookies when he was in college because I couldn't bear to see his life ruined. I thought love meant standing between them and the consequences of their sins. All I did was make them monsters."
He reached out and gently traced the edge of the bruising along my temple, his touch light as a feather.
"They thought because my thoughts get tangled sometimes, that I had forgotten what this house meant," he continued, looking out into the gray rain. "Your mother planted those climbing roses behind the garage the week we brought you home from the hospital. She carried the water in five-gallon buckets because we hadn't run the hoses out that far yet. Mark and Derek wanted to bulldoze that dirt to put up prefabricated townhomes. They told me it was 'highest and best use.' That’s what Mark called it. Highest and best use."
"They won't touch it, Dad," I promised, taking his cold hands in mine. "Julian has the trust. The court hearing is tomorrow."
"Julian is a good man," Dad said, nodding slowly. "A very good man. But tomorrow, Elaine, I am going with you."
"Dad, no," I said immediately. "The doctor said your blood pressure is dangerously high. The courtroom will be full of reporters, Mark’s attorneys, the police—it will be too much."
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Dad looked down at me, and for a fleeting moment, the dementia vanished entirely, replaced by the fierce, unyielding patriarch who had worked twelve-hour shifts in the dead of winter to ensure his family never went cold.
"I built that family, Elaine," he said, his voice clear and resonant. "And tomorrow morning, I am going to watch the law take down the rotten timber."
