“I’m sorry?” he said.
“You heard me. Emeka is alive.”
Austin crossed into the living room and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. “You seem upset. Sit down before you say something irrational.”
Aerys stayed standing.
“I saw him. I spoke to him. He told me everything.”
For the first time, her father’s eyes sharpened.
“Everything?” he repeated.
“How you threatened him. How you offered him money. How you arranged for a car to burn with his belongings inside. How you let me bury an empty coffin.”
Austin picked up a teacup, took a measured sip, and set it down again.
“That is quite a story.”
“Stop lying.”
His gaze cooled. “You are taking the word of a man living in an abandoned trailer over mine?”
“Yes.”
He did not like that.
His face changed then, losing its performance of patience.
“He was never right for you,” Austin said.
The bluntness of it stunned her, even now.
“So you admit it.”
“I admit,” he said, standing now, “that I did what was necessary. You were throwing your life away. You had talent, ambition, opportunity. He had nothing to offer you but struggle.”
“He had love,” Aerys said. “He had loyalty. He had goodness.”
“He had need,” Austin snapped. “He would have chained you to a small life.”
“You had no right.”
“I am your father.”
“A father doesn’t fake a death.”
Austin’s jaw tightened. “A father protects his child.”
“You destroyed your child.”
He walked closer, his voice lowering dangerously. “And yet look at you now. You became the woman you were supposed to become. Powerful. Respected. Untouchable.”
Aerys laughed then, but there was no joy in it. “Untouchable? I have spent eight years sleeping beside grief and calling it success.”
Austin’s expression did not soften. “Pain passes. Weakness must be cut away.”
Aerys stared at him. The cruelty in that sentence was so clean, so casual, that something inside her finally broke loose.
“You stole my life,” she said. “You stole my child.”
For the first time, genuine surprise flickered across his face.
“What child?”
Aerys looked at him with revulsion. “I was pregnant.”
Silence.
He said nothing.
And that silence was worse than any denial.
She stepped back from him. “You didn’t protect me. You protected your ego. You could not stand the idea that I loved someone you couldn’t control.”
Austin’s face hardened into something cold and final. “If you insist on seeing it that way, then yes. I chose what was best.”
Aerys felt something inside her go completely still.
“You are not my father,” she said softly.
His eyes flashed. “Watch yourself.”
“No. You watch me. Because this ends now.”
She turned to leave.
His voice stopped her at the doorway. “If you choose him over this family, there will be consequences.”
She turned her head just enough to look at him over her shoulder. “Then you should know something about me by now, Father. I don’t scare easily.”
When she left, she did not see the mask finally crack on his face.
But she felt the war begin.
She had barely reached her car when her assistant called.
“Ms. Okafor, your father just contacted the office,” Rebecca said breathlessly. “He says there are squatters on the Maple Street property. He wants us to call the police.”
Aerys closed her eyes. Of course.
“Do nothing,” she said. “Do not speak to him again. Do not authorize anything.”
Then she drove back to Maple Street as fast as the roads allowed.
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