Part 9
At 4:00 PM, my father called. His voice sounded hollow, stripped of all the booming authority he had used to terrorize me during my childhood.
"The money is there," he whispered. "Every single dollar. Check your account. Now, remove the fraud alerts. Give us back our shipping routes. Renew the lease. Fix this, Claire. We did what you wanted."
"You returned what you stole, Dad," I corrected him. "That doesn't earn you a reward. That just keeps you out of prison."
"What do you mean?" his voice cracked with sudden panic. "You said if we paid it back, you wouldn't send the files!"
"And I won't," I said smoothly. "I am a woman of my word. The IRS will not receive your ledger, and Carter's university will not receive the fraud report. You are safe from criminal prosecution."
"Then give us back our business!" he pleaded.
"No," I said.
A choked sound came from the other end of the line. "What? Claire, you can't do this! We gave you the money! If you don't give us back the shipping routes, we'll go under anyway!"
"That sounds like a personal business problem," I replied coldly. "I promised not to send the files. I never promised to keep doing business with thieves. Owen’s logistics company has already signed a permanent contract with your competitor. The warehouse lease termination stands. You have twenty-nine days left to vacate the property."
"You ruined us," he whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of terror and realization. "You completely destroyed everything we built."
"No, Dad. You ruined yourselves when you decided that one grandchild mattered more than another. You decided that my daughter's future was disposable. I merely showed you that you are the ones who are disposable."
"We will never speak to you again," my mother's voice suddenly cut in from the background, sharp with venomous hatred. "You are no longer our daughter. You are dead to us."
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"That is the best gift you've ever given me," I said, and disconnected the call.
I blocked their numbers. All of them. My mother, my father, and Sabrina. A clean, digital erasure of the toxicity that had plagued my life for thirty-five years.
