Chapter 4 - The First Morning Without a Maid
At 6:30 AM, my phone began to vibrate on Rachel’s nightstand.
I rolled over, every muscle in my torso screaming in protest. The screen lit up with a photo of my mother, smiling sweetly in front of a rose garden—a picture taken four years ago before I realized her smile only appeared when someone else was picking up the check.
I didn't answer. I let it ring until it went to voicemail.
Two minutes later, the screen lit up again. Brandon.
A minute after that, a text message popped up:
*Emily, where the hell are you? The coffee pot isn't on and Dad’s looking for his blue dry-cleaned shirt. Did you leave it at the cleaners? Call him, he’s pissed.*
I sat up, the cold morning air hitting my bare shoulders, and read the text twice. Not a word about the dining room chairs that had splintered under my back. Not a syllable asking if I was alive, or where I had slept, or whether my jaw was broken. Only coffee and a blue shirt.
Rachel walked in carrying two mugs of black coffee. She glanced at the lit phone on the bed. "The vultures are circling?"
"They haven't even noticed I'm actually gone," I said, a bitter, hollow laugh escaping my throat. "They think I went out early to run errands."
At 7:15 AM, the barrage escalated. The phone rang continuously for fifteen minutes. Then came a voice message from my father. I put the phone on speaker and set it on the nightstand between us.
His voice filled the small room, thick with the gravelly arrogance of a man who had never faced a consequence in his life.
*"Emily, pick up this damn phone. Your mother says the kitchen is a disaster area. The turkey carcass is still on the counter, and the sink is overflowing with pots. What is wrong with you? If this is your way of throwing a tantrum over last night, you’re only digging yourself a deeper hole. You apologize to your brother, you come home right now, and you clean this mess up before the neighbors see your car isn't in the driveway. Do you hear me? Call me back immediately."*
*Beep.*
Rachel looked at me, her eyes wide with sheer disbelief. "He beat you until you couldn't stand, and he expects you to come back and wash the turkey roasting pan?"
"He doesn't think of me as a person," I said, finding a strange, icy clarity settle over the chaos in my chest. "He thinks of me as a household appliance that malfunctioned."
"What are you going to do?"
I picked up the phone, unlocked it, and went into the settings. I didn't block them. Blocking them would mean they couldn't send the evidence I might need later. Instead, I put all three of their numbers on complete silence—no ring, no vibration, no alerts.
May you like
Then I stood up, walked into the bathroom, and looked at my bruises in the morning light. The swelling was worse, the purple blooming into deep, mottled black.
"First," I said to Rachel through the open door, "we go to the hospital. Then we go to the bank."
