The fluorescent lights in the emergency room buzzed above me as another wave of pain tore through my abdomen. I gasped, clutching my side, and the sound that escaped my lips was barely human. My father’s boot connected with my ribs before I could catch my breath.
“Shut up!” Douglas barked, his face twisted with disgust. “You’re making a scene.”
My sister Amber stood beside him, her phone already out, recording my agony with a smirk spreading across her face. She laughed, a sharp, cruel sound that cut deeper than any physical wound.
A young doctor passing through the waiting area stopped mid-stride, his eyes widening as he watched my father’s boot pull back from my body. Dr. Hayes moved toward us with measured steps, his professional mask firmly in place, but I could see something shifting behind his eyes.
He was maybe in his early thirties, with kind features that now held a hardness I recognized as controlled anger. “Miss, let me get you into an examination room right away,” he said, his voice gentle but firm. He did not acknowledge my father or sister, just offered me his arm.
I struggled to stand, my legs shaking beneath me. The pain in my abdomen had started six hours ago, a dull ache that escalated into something unbearable. I had called Douglas because my car was in the shop and I lived alone in a small apartment across town.
He had answered on the fifth ring, his voice already irritated before I even explained. “What now, Stacy?” he had sighed. When I told him I needed to go to the hospital, he spent ten minutes complaining about the inconvenience before finally agreeing to drive me.
Amber had invited herself along. “This should be entertaining,” she had said when she climbed into the back seat of Douglas’ truck. She was twenty-five years old but acted like a teenager, still living in our father’s house, still depending on him and her mother, Diane, for everything.
She had dropped out of community college after one semester and now spent her days posting on social media and shopping with Diane’s credit cards. The ride to the hospital had been torture. Every bump in the road sent fresh agony through my body.
But when I cried out, Douglas told me to stop being dramatic. Amber recorded me from the back seat, making mock crying sounds and posting them to her friends with laughing emojis. I saw the screen light up with responses, all of them mocking me.
This was my family. This had been my family for sixteen years. My mother died when I was twelve.
Cancer took her quickly, brutally, leaving me alone with a father who had once read me bedtime stories and taught me to ride a bike. For one year after her death, Douglas tried to maintain some semblance of normalcy. He made my meals, asked about school, hugged me when I cried.
But then he met Diane at a work conference, and everything changed. Diane had money, old family money that she wielded like a weapon. She had a daughter named Amber who was nine at the time, spoiled and sharp-tongued even then.
Douglas married Diane eleven months after my mother’s funeral. I wore a stiff dress to the wedding and tried to smile, desperately hoping this new family would heal the wound my mother’s death had left. Instead, the wound deepened.
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