Chapter 8 - The Desperate Counterattack
The storm didn't stay in New Bern.
By Thursday afternoon, it had reached SouthPark.
I was at the dental clinic, finishing a periodontal cleaning on an elderly woman who had been coming to our practice since I was in high school, when our receptionist, Sarah, tapped on the operatory glass.
“Molly,” Sarah said, her voice tight with that specific brand of professional anxiety reserved for difficult patients. “Your sister is in the waiting room.”
My hand froze on the ultrasonic scaler.
“Tell her I’m with a patient,” I said calmly.
“I did. She said she’s not leaving until you speak with her. She’s... Molly, she’s making a scene. Dr. Arrington had to come out of room three because she was talking so loudly about ‘civil liability’ and ‘stolen medical records.’”
I took a slow breath, turned off the water spray, and laid the handpiece in its cradle. “Mrs. Gable, I’m going to have Dr. Arrington finish your polish. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
“Take your time, honey,” the old woman said, patting my arm with a latex-gloved hand. “Family is a trial. My sister Edna didn't speak to me between nineteen-eighty-two and the bicentennial because of a silver teapot.”
I stripped off my gloves, threw them in the biohazard bin, and walked down the carpeted hallway toward the reception area.
Renee was standing beside the magazine rack.
She looked worse than she had on Sunday, though she had clearly tried to hide it. She had too much concealer under her eyes, and her cream-colored trench coat had a coffee stain near the pocket that she hadn't noticed. Her hair was pulled back into a severe bun that looked painful, pulling the skin of her temples taut.
Two patients—a young mother with a toddler and an accountant in a gray suit—were staring at the floor, pretending to be fascinated by four-year-old issues of *Southern Living*.
“In my office,” I said, not looking at her as I walked past the reception desk toward the small consultation room we used for treatment planning.
She followed me, her heels clicking like small hammers against the tile.
The moment the door clicked shut behind her, she turned on me.
“You gave him the name,” she hissed, her voice low and venomous. “Julian gave Marcus that boy’s name.”
I sat down behind the small laminate desk, folded my hands, and looked at her. “Julian didn't have to give him anything, Renee. You gave it to him. On Sunday night. On white bond paper with a laboratory seal.”
“That was private property!” Her hands were trembling as she clutched her Louis Vuitton bag against her stomach like a shield. “That test was run under my account! You had no legal right to access that database or contact that person!”
“Julian didn't access your account, Renee,” I said evenly. “The laboratory included the familial match on page three of the report you handed to him across my dining table. You gave it to him. In front of four witnesses. There’s no court in North Carolina that’s going to entertain a privacy claim when you literally dropped the document onto his dinner plate.”
Her face turned a mottled, ugly purple. “Do you know what he’s doing? Marcus called my phone this morning! He left a voicemail, Molly! He said he was going to bring that boy to Mom’s house on Sunday!”
“Good,” I said.
“Good?” She stepped toward the desk, her knuckles white as she leaned over the laminate. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what this does to my business? I’m in the middle of closing a sixty-thousand-dollar brand partnership with an athletic apparel line out of Atlanta! If this gets out—if people find out I have an illegitimate son who works with a surveyor’s crew in the swamps—my reputation is ruined!”
I stared at her.
For thirty-four years, I had tried to understand my sister. I had made excuses for her cruelty, her vanity, her sudden disappearances and her vicious tongue. I had told myself she was wounded, that our mother’s suffocating expectations had warped her, that her divorces had broken something inside her that couldn't be mended.
But looking at her now, across a cheap desk in a dental office, I realized there was nothing broken in Renee. She was working exactly as she was designed to work: with absolute, total, and unwavering devotion to herself.
“An illegitimate son,” I repeated slowly.
“You know what I mean!”
“His name is Tyler,” I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, dangerous register that Julian used. “He has Marcus’s eyes. He has our grandfather’s chin. And he spent twenty-two years thinking his father abandoned him because you were too cowardly to admit you got pregnant by a boy who worked with wood.”
“He was nothing!” she screamed, forgetting the patients in the waiting room, forgetting the thin walls of the consultation office. “He was a nobody from Wilkes County who was never going to make more than forty grand a year! Was I supposed to ruin my life for that?”
“You didn't ruin your life, Renee,” I said, standing up until I was looking down into her wide, furious eyes. “You ruined his. You took twenty-two years of fatherhood from Marcus Miller. You took a brother from Julian. You took a nephew from me. And you did it so you could drive a Mercedes you can't afford and pretend you’re better than the people who love you.”
She reached out and grabbed my arm, her manicured nails digging through the fabric of my scrubs. “You call Julian. You tell him to call Marcus off. You tell them if they bring that boy to Matthews on Sunday, I’ll hire a lawyer and tie them up in court until they’re broke!”
I looked down at her fingers on my arm.
Then I looked into her face.
“Take your hands off me, Renee.”
Something in my tone—perhaps the absolute lack of fear, or the cold, steady certainty that she had no power left—made her fingers uncurl.
She stepped back, her breath coming in short, ugly wheezes.
“If you ever come to this clinic again,” I said, “I will have Dr. Arrington call the sheriff’s department to have you trespassed. If you call Julian, he will block your number. And if you show up in Matthews on Sunday... well, that’s between you, Dad, and the boy you threw away.”
She stood there for three seconds, her mouth opening and closing like a landed fish.
Then she turned, yanked the door open with such violence that the brass handle struck the drywall, and stormed down the hall.
May you like
A moment later, the front door of the clinic slammed shut, the bell above it ringing with a frantic, metallic jangle that hung in the quiet lobby long after her heels had faded down the sidewalk.
***
