‘Then go back there.’
Her father nodded.
‘That’s right.
You don’t let someone do this to you.’
Matthew looked at him.
Something in his expression had changed.
‘To me?’
The older man frowned.
Matthew held up Clara’s letter.
‘My wife threw a plate at him.’
Brenda stared.
‘Excuse me?’
‘You threw a plate at my father.’
‘Because he humiliated us.’
‘No.
He said no.’
It was the first honest sentence Matthew had spoken all evening.
Brenda stepped closer.
‘Don’t you dare turn this around because you’re scared of losing money.’
Matthew flinched because the accusation landed too close to the truth.
He was scared.
But not only of the money.
He was beginning to understand that the things he had treated as evidence of adulthood were borrowed supports.
The apartment.
The cards.
The family safety net.
Even the certainty that his father would absorb whatever insult came next.
The manager returned with information about retrieving essential belongings under supervised access while counsel handled the termination.
Brenda argued.
Her father argued louder.
Matthew did not.
He folded Clara’s letter carefully and put it inside his coat.
They spent that night in a hotel Brenda’s father paid for after three of Brenda’s cards failed and Matthew’s personal card barely cleared the deposit.
The next morning, my phone started again at seven sixteen.
This time I answered.
Matthew spoke first.
‘Dad.’
I said nothing.
‘I read Mom’s letter.’
‘I assumed you would.’
A pause.
‘You planned this.’
‘Your mother planned the letter.
The trust was something we planned together.’
‘You were waiting for me to fail some test?’
‘No.’
My voice remained calm.
‘I was waiting for you to stop treating every boundary as betrayal.’
He breathed into the phone.
‘Brenda shouldn’t have thrown the plate.’
That wording told me how far he still had to go.
‘She could have hit me.’
‘I know.’
‘And you blamed me for upsetting her.’
Another silence.
‘I know.’
