Chapter 43 Playing the Long Game
The first year of college, I didn’t speak to my father at all.
His calls came first. Then texts. I did not block him. I wanted him to feel it. To see the messages deliver and go unanswered. To hear the phone ring into nothing.
Then emails carefully worded to sound normal, as if nothing had fractured between us. He wrote about campus. About the weather. About how proud he was. About how much he missed me.
Apologies, vague and clumsy. He wrote he wanted to talk. That he hoped I was settling in. That he was giving me space, but not too much. That he was here whenever I was ready.
I never answered.
It was easier that way. Cleaner. Distance stripped him of his authority and reduced him to what he actually was. A man who had failed and wanted absolution without consequence.
Then Amy showed me something. Messages between Apple and Marissa.
They were happy I was gone. They talked openly about how peaceful the house was now.
How Apple would inherit everything someday, the company, the house, the legacy.
How I would get nothing. How me leaving had solved a problem they’d been waiting years to erase.
Apple had changed her phone after the graduation party. New device. New passwords. She thought she was safe. What she did not realize was that she still backed everything up to iCloud automatically. Amy had access again in five minutes.
All those years the clone phone stayed synced and I read everything.
That was when I decided to let my father back in. Strategically.
I answered one message. Then another. Short replies. Polite. Distant. Enough to give him hope. He tried harder immediately. Longer messages. Calls filled with relief. Apologies layered with self-pity. He sounded grateful, almost desperate.
I let him work for it.
By my second year, I agreed to come back for Thanksgiving.
He hadn’t warned them.
Marissa’s face when I walked in was worth the flight alone. Apple’s smile slipped before she could catch it.
Dinner was tense. The passive aggression started immediately.
Marissa was still bitter about the trust fund repayment.
My father had forced her to sell most of her designer bags, and even that hadn’t been enough.
They had taken out a second mortgage to pay me back within the ten days I’d given them.
The resentment sat thick in the room, clung to every word she spoke.
Apple spent the entire meal trying to bait me. Little comments. Side glances. Questions designed to provoke. She wanted me defensive, emotional, unstable. The version of me she liked to describe to other people.
I didn’t give her that satisfaction.
When Marissa commented on how “lonely” my life must be, I mentioned my internship offers and upcoming travel plans.
“When I was your age,” Marissa said pointedly, “I understood the importance of family obligations.”
I nodded once. “When you were my age, you were a secretary sleeping with a married man. We all start somewhere.”
Apple choked on her drink.
My father didn’t rush to silence me. He stiffened, jaw tightening, eyes fixed on his plate, but he didn’t tell me to apologize. He didn’t tell me to watch my tone.
Marissa flushed, the red creeping up her neck. “That’s inappropriate.”
I shrugged lightly. “So was stealing from a child.”
In the months that followed, I visited my father about four times a year. Always at the house. Just to irritate Marissa and Apple. Every meeting was a performance. I pretended I was healing. That forgiveness might be possible. That I wanted a relationship.
In reality, I was disgusted.
Every meeting took restraint. Every conversation required me to swallow the urge to say everything I thought. I needed him functional. Remorseful. Trying.
Then, in my third year, Amy called me with news that blindsided me.
My father had a child with the current secretary.
A son. My half-brother.
He must have been around two years old when I was kidnapped in my past life.
In my last life, I never found out about him.
I sat with that information for a long time.
It explained a lot about that time period.
His absence. His distraction. How easily he let the world turn against me when I needed him most. While I was being vilified, broken, and blamed, he had been busy building a replacement. An heir. A son.
After the birth, he reached out less. Not intentionally, perhaps. But noticeably. Less urgency. Less desperation. His attention had shifted.
Over the years, I also learned how to play quieter games.
I sent Marissa anonymous hints about my father’s affair. Nothing overt. Nothing that could be traced back to me. Just enough to make a reasonable woman pause. The kind of breadcrumbs she herself had once scattered for my mother.
Nothing happened.
Marissa chose blindness. She pretended everything was fine, and as far as I knew, she never confronted him.
Maybe she was afraid of being discarded.
Afraid of losing her place, her comfort, her access to everything she’d clawed her way into.
So she smiled, hosted dinners, played the devoted wife, and swallowed humiliation.
I never mentioned the child in those hints. The boy was innocent. He did not belong in the wreckage of adults who should have known better.
Still, something Marissa had said after the graduation party kept circling my mind like a splinter I couldn’t dig out.
“He was mine first.“
It didn’t sit right.
So I asked Amy to dig.
It didn’t take long.
It turned out Marissa and my dad had known each other long before my mother ever existed in his life. Same hometown. Same high school. Marissa was two years younger. They’d hooked up. Nothing official. Brandon hadn’t wanted to commit.
When he left for college at Berkeley, they drifted apart. Marissa still had two years of school left. At Berkeley, Brandon met Ines. Love at first sight. His first serious relationship. The one he chose. The one he committed to.
Two years later, Marissa followed him.
She arrived with expectations she had built entirely on her own. Convinced he was the love of her life. Certain that now he was old enough, settled enough, he would finally choose her.
Instead, she found him in love with someone else.
He refused her.
What Marissa did in the two years after that is unclear. But somehow she re-entered his life as his secretary.
And the rest of what happened I already knew.