Silence. I put down the spoon and turned.
What I saw stopped me cold.
What I saw stopped me cold.
She was standing in the doorway, shaking like a leaf, and her eyes were red-rimmed.
“Dad…” she murmured. “I… I need to tell you something. I won’t be here for Thanksgiving dinner.”
My stomach dropped.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Then she said the sentence that felt like a fist to the chest.
“I won’t be here for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“Dad, I’m going to my real father. You can’t even imagine WHO he is. You know him. He promised me something.”
The air rushed out of my lungs, leaving me hollow. “Your… what?”
She swallowed hard, her eyes darting around the room as if looking for an escape route. “He found me. Two weeks ago. On Instagram.”
And then she said his name.
“He promised me something.”
Chase, the local baseball star who was a hero on the field and a menace everywhere else, was her father. I’d read the articles; he was all ego and zero substance.
And I loathed him.
“Grace, that man hasn’t spoken to you in your entire life. He’s never asked about you.”
She looked down at her hands, twisting her fingers together. “I know. But he — he said something. Something important.”
“He said something important.”
Her voice cracked, a tiny, pained sound. “He said… he could ruin you, Dad.”
My blood ran cold. “He WHAT?”
She took a shaking breath, and the words tumbled out in a terrified rush. “He said he has connections and that he can shut down your shoe shop with one phone call. But he promised he wouldn’t if I did something for him.”
I kneeled before her. “What did he ask you to do, Grace?”
“What did he ask you to do, Grace?”
“He said if I don’t go with him tonight for his team’s big Thanksgiving dinner, he’ll make sure you lose everything. He needs me to SHOW everyone that he is a self-sacrificing family man who raised his daughter alone. He wants to steal YOUR role.”
The irony, the sheer, disgusting nerve of it, made me feel sick. I felt something inside me just collapse.
One thing was certain: there was no way I was going to lose my little girl!
There was no way I was going to lose my little girl!
“And you believed him?” I asked gently.
She burst into tears. “Dad, you worked your whole life for that shop! I didn’t know what else to do.”
I took her hands in mine. “Grace, listen to me. No job is worth losing you. The shop is a place, but you’re my whole world.”
Then she whispered something that made me realize the threats were just the tip of the iceberg.
The threats were just the tip of the iceberg.
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