Chapter 7 - The Final ConfrontationI scheduled a visitation at the county jail to see my father, Arthur.
When he sat down on the other side of the thick glass partition, wearing an orange jumpsuit, he looked twenty years older. His hair was messy, his shoulders slumped in utter defeat.
"Sarah..." he choked out, pressing his trembling hand against the glass. "Please... you have to help me get out on bail. My lawyers say I'm facing fifteen years for conspiracy. I didn't know about the poisoning! I swear to you, I thought you were really sick! Linda manipulated me!"
"You stood at the edge of the pool while I drowned, Dad," I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion. "You told them to let me float there and think about my selfishness."
"I was a fool!" he wept. "I loved your mother too much! I listened to her!"
"You loved her money and her status," I corrected him coldly. "But I didn't come here to listen to your excuses. I came to give you a gift."
I pressed the DNA report up against the glass.
Arthur leaned forward, squinting at the official state lab seal. As his eyes scanned the text, reading the genetic markers and the name Victor Vance, his breath hitched. His eyes widened in horrified realization.
"No..." Arthur gasped, his body shaking violently. "No... no, this isn't real... Emily... Emily isn't my daughter?"
"Linda cheated on you with Victor Vance twenty-six years ago," I revealed, leaning into the microphone. "She spent your entire marriage making you love another man's child while teaching you to hate your real daughter—the only person in that house who actually shared your blood."
Arthur burst into deep, gut-wrenching sobs, slamming his forehead against the glass partition until guards had to hold him back.
May you like
"You spent your life protecting a lie, Dad," I said softly, standing up from my chair. "Now you get to spend the next fifteen years thinking about it in a six-by-eight cell."
I turned my back on his desperate cries and walked out into the sunlight.
