Usually mine.
Now he lifted his wrist and checked the time, and the sunlight caught the face of a brand-new Rolex.
It was gold and vulgar and expensive enough that I knew immediately where the down payment had gone.
“Thought you’d be later,” he said, like I had interrupted brunch.
I let my eyes rest on the watch for exactly one beat too long.
Then I looked at my father.
Richard was sixty-two and built like a man who had always expected rooms to part for him. He still had most of his dark hair, though now it was silver at the temples in a way women at church probably found distinguished. He wore pressed jeans, a quarter-zip sweater, and the kind of expression he usually reserved for waiters, junior associates, and people he was preparing to talk over.
“Caleb got into some trouble,” he said, taking another sip of beer as if we were discussing weather damage. “He owed the wrong people money. One hundred and twenty thousand, to be exact. We had to move fast.”
“We?” I asked.
My voice came out low, flat, almost curious.
It irritated him immediately.
He took the beer bottle away from his mouth and narrowed his eyes. “Family sacrifices for family.”
That sentence had been the backbone of my childhood.
It meant I gave up debate camp because Caleb needed private coaching.
It meant my college fund vanished into his rehab, then into a legal retainer, then into “business capital.”
It meant when I enlisted, my father told people proudly that I was serving my country while privately informing me I was abandoning my family. It meant every achievement of mine arrived to him already pre-converted into something Caleb deserved more.
I looked past him toward the open front door.
A man in coveralls came out carrying one of my framed commendations—the one for meritorious service during a classified supply recovery operation overseas. He didn’t even hold it upright. It hung crooked in his arm beside a box of books. Then he tossed both into the dumpster.
The glass cracked with a sound so precise it made my jaw clench.
“You sold my house,” I said.
“You don’t need a whole house,” Richard replied. “You’re never here. You’re deployed half the time, in barracks the rest. This was the practical choice.”
Practical.
I almost laughed.
There are words selfish people use when they want theft to sound mature.
Caleb tipped his beer at me. “It’s not like you had a family in there, sis.”
I turned back to him fully then, and for the first time since I stepped out of the taxi, my anger showed—not in movement, not in volume, but in the fact that he stopped smiling.
“You used the power of attorney,” I said.
It wasn’t a question.
Richard’s mouth twitched. “You signed it.”
I had.
Eighteen months earlier, right before my previous rotation, I had signed a military deployment power of attorney naming Richard as a limited emergency agent for certain personal matters if I became unreachable, medically incapacitated, or killed. I’d done it because one of the women in my unit had come home from a bad situation to find her accounts frozen and her landlord filing notices because no one had legal authority to act while she was in intensive care overseas. I had told myself I was being practical. I had told myself that if the worst happened, at least there would be a clean line of authority for insurance, medical decisions, temporary bill management.
What I had not told myself—because I did not want to see it—was that my father treated authority the way Caleb treated credit cards: as permission to take what was easiest.
