The Daughter They Didn’t Want Won The Lottery Chapter 14
For two days, they trailed after me like a pair of stray cats.
I got on the Tube; they crammed in behind me. I walked into a lecture hall; they stood outside the door, peering through the glass. I sat down to lunch at the campus café; they took a table across the room and stared.
My classmates started asking who those two were. I said, “Lost tourists, I think.”
I let them follow.
They were on tourist visas. Two weeks and they had to leave the country. Follow all you want. I wasn’t giving them a single dollar.
Then, on the third day, Mom stopped following me.
I came home late that afternoon, pushed the door open—and there she was, sitting cross-legged on my kitchen floor, a paring knife pressed to the inside of her own wrist.
Dad was on his knees in front of her, hands hovering, sweat pouring down his temples.
“Linda—Linda, put it down, please, just put it down, we can talk about this—”
She saw me. Her voice went shrill.
“Emma. You hand over that money right now, or I do it. Right here on your kitchen floor. And you spend the rest of your life knowing you killed your own mother.”
I stood in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder and looked at her.
I looked at her for three long seconds.
Then I set the bag down on the counter. Crossed the room. Crouched. Put my face level with hers.
“Go ahead,” I said, quietly. “I’ll handle the funeral.”
Her eyes locked with mine and she saw I wasn’t bluffing. Her hand jerked. The knife hit the tile with a small metallic clatter.
Dad moved faster than I’d ever seen him move. He grabbed the knife, threw it into the sink, and collapsed against the cabinets.
Then he did something I had never in my life seen him do.
He cried.
Not the tight-throated way men cry in front of other men. Real, ugly crying. Shoulders shaking.
The man who’d spent nineteen years silent, absent, agreeing with whatever Mom said—was sitting on my kitchen floor with his hands over his face.
“Emma—” his voice broke. “We failed you, kid. Your mother and I—we failed you. I’m sorry. I’m so goddamn sorry.”
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. His eyes were red-rimmed and hollowed out. There were streaks of gray at his temples I didn’t remember.
“We’ll go home tomorrow. We won’t come back. You stay here. Finish school. Live your life. Just—please.”
Mom whipped around and slapped him across the face.
“What are you saying? She has half a million dollars! That money belongs to this family—”
Dad didn’t dodge. Five red lines came up on his cheek. He closed his eyes.
“Linda. You bought Chloe a four-thousand-dollar Apple bundle for graduation. Emma couldn’t get fifteen hundred for a prep course. You know that. You know that.”
Mom’s mouth opened and closed. Nothing came out.
I stood up. Looked down at both of them.
“Mom. I’m nineteen. I’m an adult. That money is locked in a trust. Not even I can touch it on a whim. You can sit on my kitchen floor screaming yourself blue and you will not get a cent of it.”
She looked up at me. Tears on her face. But underneath them, the greed and the will finally cracked, and something old and small and tired was left underneath.
Her head lowered.
They flew home the next day.
I stood at my window and watched them wheel their suitcases to a black cab. Just before Mom got in, she turned and looked up at my window. I didn’t move. Let her see me. She held my eyes for a few seconds. Then folded into the back seat and pulled the door shut. The cab pulled away and turned the corner and was gone.
I didn’t go to Heathrow.
I never wanted to see any of them again.
After that, my life went quiet the way still water is quiet.
Up at seven. Breakfast at the counter. Walk to campus. When language classes ended, I moved into a proper undergraduate program and picked business.
The coursework wasn’t easy, but I didn’t run myself into the ground either. I didn’t need a job. I didn’t need to save. I just needed to learn.
I made friends. Real ones.
Mina, a Korean-American in my program—took one look at my clothes on the first day of term and dragged me to Selfridges for a proper haircut and a proper coat. “Em, love yourself a little, okay?”
Marco, an Italian boy who cooked terrible pasta with total confidence—one night he burned a whole pot of it and served it to everyone in the flat share, and only I ate mine down to the last bite. From then on, he decided I was his soulmate.
And Martha across the hall, who baked shortbread every Sunday and knocked on my door and worried aloud that I was too young to be so far from home.
For almost twenty years I’d never lived like a normal person.