Chapter 2 - The Trespassers
The word “wife” hung in the air of my kitchen, thick and suffocating, like the humidity before a devastating summer storm.
I stared at Richard. My biological father. The man who had sent me exactly four birthday cards in my entire twenty-six years of existence, all of them containing expired coupons or generic, thoughtless signatures. Now, he was standing in my home, shielding the woman who had once held my hair back while I cried over his absence.
“Wife,” I whispered, the syllable tasting like ash in my mouth.
Brianna was still clutching her head, leaning against my custom oak cabinets. She let out a dramatic, trembling sob, peering at me through her perfectly curled lashes. “Richard, she’s crazy! I told you she was unstable! Look what she did to me!”
“Maya, what is wrong with you?” Richard boomed, stepping forward. He puffed out his chest, trying to use his height to intimidate me, a trick I assumed he used often in his hollow life. “We came here to make peace. To be a family. And you attack your stepmother like a feral animal?”
“Stepmother?” A laugh burst from my chest, sharp and hysterical. It echoed off the subway tile backsplash. “Stepmother? She’s twenty-six, Richard! She’s my age! She was my roommate sophomore year, you sick, twisted old man!”
Richard flushed a deep, ugly crimson. “Love doesn’t see age, Maya. Brianna understands me in a way nobody else ever has. When she reached out to me on Facebook last year to check on how you were doing, we just… connected. We fell in love.”
My stomach bottomed out. She reached out to him. Brianna hadn't just bumped into him. She had hunted him down. She had used my tragic stories, my vulnerable confessions about my wealthy but absent father, as a roadmap to her next meal ticket.
The little boy, sitting at the island with crab butter smeared across his chubby cheeks, began to wail loudly. The sound snapped me out of my shock and into cold, crystalline rage.
“Get out,” I said, my voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm register.
“Excuse me?” Richard scoffed. “I am your father. You don’t speak to me—”
“I said get out!” I roared, slamming my hand down on the quartz countertop. The empty, cracked crab shells clattered against the wood. “You broke into my house. You ate the food my mother—the woman you abandoned—sent to me. You brought a gold-digging parasite into my sanctuary. You have exactly two minutes to take off my robe, pack up your bastard child, and get off my property before I call the police and press charges for breaking and entering.”
Brianna gasped, her face turning pale. “Maya, you wouldn't. We're family. Leo is your brother!”
“Leo is a stranger, and you are a trespasser,” I pulled my phone from my back pocket and dialed 9-1-1, holding my thumb over the call button. “Take off my robe, Brianna. Right now. Or I will rip it off you myself.”
For a second, I saw the real Brianna flash in her eyes—the cold, calculating girl who had stolen my emergency rent money six years ago and vanished in the middle of the night. Her lip curled into a sneer. She unknotted the pale blue silk, letting it slide off her shoulders and onto the floor. Underneath, she was wearing a cheap, wrinkled sundress.
“You’re going to regret this, Maya,” Richard spat, grabbing the terrified little boy by the hand. “I was going to include you in my new will. I was going to give you a piece of the Calloway estate. Now? You get nothing.”
“Keep your fake estate, Richard,” I said, staring him dead in the eye. “And leave the spare key you stole from my planter on the counter. Now.”
He threw the silver key onto the island, and the three of them marched out the front door into the sweltering night. As soon as the deadbolt clicked shut, my legs gave out. I slid down the refrigerator door, pulled my knees to my chest, and sobbed until my throat burned.
When the tears finally stopped, I picked up my phone and dialed the only person who mattered.
“Mom?” I choked out when she answered.
“Maya, baby, what’s wrong?” her voice was instantly filled with fierce, protective warmth.
I told her everything. The break-in. The crab legs. Brianna. The marriage. The kid. I expected my mother to cry, or to express outrage on my behalf. Instead, a long, heavy silence stretched across the line.
Then, my mother started to laugh. It wasn't a happy laugh. It was dark, rich, and deeply vindictive.
“Mom?” I asked, confused.
“Oh, my sweet girl,” she wheezed. “Brianna thinks she hit the jackpot, doesn't she? She thinks she snagged the great Richard Calloway and his fortune.”
“Didn’t she?” I asked, wiping my eyes.
May you like
“Maya, your father is broke,” my mother revealed, her voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “He’s been bankrupt for three years. He lives off credit cards and loans from dangerous people. He has absolutely nothing. If your ex-best friend married him for money... she just chained herself to a sinking ship.”
A slow, wicked smile spread across my face.
