Chapter 3 - The Fall of the House of Carter
By the time we reached the Vance estate on the other side of the valley,
my phone—which Eleanor had replaced with a new one—began to blow up with notifications.
My father was calling.
Karen was texting.
Even Ethan was sending frantic messages.
'Emily,
please!'
'Tell her to stop!'
'The police are here and they say we have to leave!'
I ignored them all.
I stood in the grand foyer of my grandmother's mansion,
staring at a large monitor that showed a live feed from the security cameras at my father’s house.
It was a massacre of vanity.
Large yellow excavators had arrived,
their headlights cutting through the blizzard like the eyes of monsters.
I watched as Robert stood on the lawn in his pajamas,
shouting at a man in a hard hat.
The man simply handed him a folder of legal papers.
Because the house was held in a trust that Robert had violated by mistreating the primary heir,
the trust had a 'burn' clause.
If the heir was ever in danger,
the assets were to be liquidated or destroyed to prevent the abuser from profiting.
My grandmother didn't play games.
She didn't want the money back.
She wanted the memory of his betrayal erased from the earth.
The first blow hit the master bedroom.
The wall crumbled like crackers.
I saw Karen’s designer dresses fly out into the wind,
swirling away into the dark.
I saw Ethan’s gaming setup crushed under a ton of brick.
My father fell to his knees in the snow,
the same snow he had forced me to stand in.
He was begging.
He was crying.
But there was no one to listen.
"Does it hurt?"
Eleanor asked,
standing beside me with a glass of dark juice.
"No,"
I said,
and for the first time in years,
I felt light.
"It feels like breathing for the first time."
The house,
the symbol of my misery,
was becoming a pile of rubble.
The gold watch he had boasted about was likely buried under a thousand pounds of concrete.
The letter from Hawthorne Preparatory Academy was safe in my pocket now,
the driver had retrieved it before the machines started.
May you like
My father had tried to take my future,
so I took his present.
