He Watched Me Freeze Now He Begs For My Return Chapter 29
Before Elaine was sentenced, her lawyer made a request as well.
She wanted to apply for home confinement, but she no longer had a house, nor any relative willing to act as her supervisor.
Paige refused.
Robert was in prison.
The friends who had once praised Elaine at her charity galas had not answered a single call since the videos were released.
So she thought of me.
“She wants to use your Chicago address temporarily,” my lawyer told me. “She says she won’t disturb you. She only needs paperwork showing that a direct family member is willing to receive her.”
For a moment, I thought I had misheard.
Elaine had watched my location freeze in a blizzard and never once drove out to get me.
Now she had nowhere to live and somehow believed I should open my door.
“No.”
“She may face a harsher custodial sentence because of that.”
“That will be because of what she did, and what the court decides. Not because of me.”
My lawyer nodded and wrote down my answer.
That evening, Elaine sent another message through her attorney.
She said she had given birth to me and raised me, and that even if she had done wrong, she should not be left with no one to care for her. She said Paige had abandoned her, Robert had pushed the blame onto her, and if I refused her too, she would truly have nothing left.
Every word was about what she had lost.
Not a single one asked how I had survived.
I didn’t reply.
On the day of her sentencing, Elaine cried so hard in court she could barely stand.
She told the judge her family was shattered, her husband imprisoned, her adopted daughter estranged, and her biological daughter gone. She called that punishment enough.
The prosecutor asked her only one question:
“Why did your family shatter?”
Elaine opened her mouth, but no answer came out.
Because she could no longer say that I had destroyed the family.
The full footage had already proved that long before I left, their house was filled with lies, favoritism, and calculation.
All I had done was stop pretending everything was fine.
The court did not approve her request.
After the sentence was delivered, she had her lawyer ask me one last thing—if I would take a final phone call from her before she reported to prison.
I said no.
She had more than twenty years to speak to me properly.
When the basement door opened. When my apartment was ransacked for a prank. When I searched for my dog in the rain. Before the blizzard ever came. She had a chance every time.
I wasn’t the one who took them away.
She had chosen Paige’s laughter and the Bennett family’s image over and over again.
That late phone call had no meaning left.