Chapter 8 - The Confrontation
I didn't scream. I didn't cry.
I walked straight across the concrete floor, closing the distance between Victoria and me. Her lawyer instinctively stepped back, his hands raised in surrender.
Victoria pressed herself back against a row of wooden pallets, her eyes wide with animal terror.
“Emily… wait…” she whispered, her voice failing her.
“You took my first business,” I said, every word hitting with the impact of an iron hammer. “You destroyed my engagement with Mark. You watched me cry on our parents' kitchen floor for four months, barely able to eat, thinking I had ruined everyone’s lives.”
“You… you were going to be more successful than me!” Victoria spat out, cornered and desperate, the venom bubbling up from the rot in her chest. “You were twenty-one! You had an exhibition in the Chicago Cultural Center! Dad never stopped talking about your furniture! I couldn't breathe in that house! Everything was always *'Emily’s so gifted! Emily has raw talent!'*”
“And so you salted the earth,” I said.
“Yes!” she screamed, completely unhinged now. “Because without your talent, you were just a mouse! You were nothing! I made myself who I am!”
“No, Victoria,” Michael said from behind me, his voice heavy with finality. “You made yourself a felon.”
The detectives stepped forward, clicking the handcuffs around her wrists. Victoria didn't fight them this time. She collapsed into their hold, weeping hysterically, the mascara running in black rivers down her pale cheeks as they read her the Miranda rights and escorted her into the back of an unmarked police cruiser.
Her lawyer scrambled after them, muttering about emergency bond hearings and psychiatric evaluations.
In the warehouse, only the four of us remained: Grandma Rose, Julian, Michael, and me.
Arthur Bradley stepped toward me, his hands shaking slightly. “Emily… my brother Mark has lived with the guilt of walking away from you ever since he found out what really happened this morning. He wanted to call you, but I told him he didn't have the right. None of us did.”
I looked at Arthur, the ghost of my past standing before me.
May you like
“Tell Mark I forgive him,” I said softly. “But tell him not to call. That chapter of my life is closed. And I am writing a new one.”
***
