Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1 — The Drive to Elmwood
The hospital discharge papers felt heavy in my hand.
Fourteen stitches.
A mild concussion.
A fractured orbital bone that painted the left side of my face in shades of violent purple.
And a piece of paper telling me I was free to go.
Go where?
To the house my father had just tried to give away.
I called a cab.
I didn’t want to deal with the stares on public transit, though I quickly realized privacy was a luxury I no longer possessed.
The cab driver kept glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
His eyes darted from my bruised face to his phone, which was mounted on the dashboard.
He recognized me.
Everyone in the city recognized me by now.
The video had been clipped, remixed, and shared across every platform in existence.
They had slowed down the moment of impact.
They had isolated the sound of my skull hitting the wall.
They had analyzed my father’s face, freezing on the cold, dead look in his eyes just before he struck his own son.
"You're the guy, aren't you?" the driver finally asked, his voice hushed, almost reverent.
"I just want to go home," I said quietly.
"Elmwood Drive, right?" he replied.
I hadn't even given him the address yet.
That was how famous my pain had become.
When we pulled onto my street, I saw the circus before I heard it.
Three news vans were parked on the lawn.
Reporters were standing on my driveway, holding microphones, talking to cameras with expressions of manufactured sympathy.
A crowd of onlookers had gathered on the sidewalk, pointing at the windows.
My home—the place I had poured my blood, sweat, and savings into—had become a crime scene in the court of public opinion.
I didn't ask the driver to stop in front of the house.
I had him drop me off two blocks down, slipping through the neighbor's backyard to reach my own back fence.
I climbed over the wooden slats, my head throbbing with every movement.
I unlocked the back door and stepped into the kitchen.
It was completely silent.
The air smelled like the coffee I had brewed the morning of the wedding, feeling like a lifetime ago.
I walked through the rooms, trailing my fingers along the walls I had painted.
I looked at the hardwood floors I had sanded and stained by hand.
I thought about the thousands of dollars I had wired to the hospital when my father’s liver started failing three years ago.
He had promised me the deed the day he was discharged.
He lied.
I walked to the front window and peeked through the blinds at the media circus outside.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
It was a text from an unknown number.
"Ethan, it's Richard. You have ruined this family. Call me immediately."
He didn't call himself Dad. He called himself Richard.
And he still thought he was in control.
I didn't reply.
Instead, I called a locksmith.
It was time to secure the fortress.
May you like
The locks were changing today.
And tomorrow, the real war would begin.
