29. Eli #2
“No,” I say, sharper now. “I heard the words, and they don’t make a damn bit of sense. What are you talking about?”
He looks at me as if I’m the one dragging this out. “Your cousin Brendon was cut off a few months ago for being involved with a man.”
The whole sentence still takes a second to become real. I’m too busy trying to process the fact that my father is standing here telling me I’m forcing his hand by loving and keeping my daughter, while his own sister already did this to her child.
Brendon.
Quiet, stiff, churchgoing, law-student Brendon. The one who always comes to watch my games when we play against Lakehaven. The only one who ever bothered to keep up with my life, whom I haven’t spoken to in months because of how chaotic my life got.
“What the fuck is wrong with this family?” The words crack out of me harder than I meant them to, and this time I don’t care when my mother flinches. “Don’t stand here and act like you’re the victim; you’re not. You’re making a choice, just like your sister did.”
He takes another step forward, voice dropping into that dangerous quiet he uses when he wants control back by force. “This is not the same. You still have a chance to correct your situation.”
The sentence is so monstrous I actually stare at him before understanding hits.
He just compared what they’re doing to me with what happened to Brendon because somewhere in his head all of this lives in the same moral category.
His sister cut off a son for being with a man.
He’s about to cut off his son for refusing to erase a child born in scandal.
To them, these are adjacent sins. Adjacent embarrassments. Adjacent stains to be managed.
The realization makes me feel sick.
“No, what I can do is keep my daughter safe and make sure she grows up knowing she’s wanted. What I can do is refuse to let two people who called her a bastard child anywhere near her life again.”
My mother makes a soft, wrecked sound, while my father goes still.
“You do not get to speak to me about family,” I continue, and now every word comes clean.
I’m finally too angry to wobble under it.
“Not after the way you talked about her. Not after the way you talked about me and what happened to me. Not after standing here and acting like I’m making you do something awful when you’re the one choosing appearances over your own son. ”
“You watch yourself,” he grits out. “You know exactly what you stand to lose.”
There’s his last weapon. I think of how scared I was once of this exact conversation and how, standing here now, the terror has finally curdled all the way into contempt.
“There it is,” I say softly. “Money.”
My mother looks genuinely distressed now, but that doesn’t move me anymore. “It’s not just money, Eli—”
“It’s always money with people like you when love and threats stop working.”
My father’s mouth thins. “If you walk away from us, you walk away from every comfort you’ve taken for granted. Your mother and I will not continue funding recklessness.”
I let out a slow breath. “Keep your money,” I tell them. “Keep every dime. Keep the family name if that matters more to you than I do. Keep the fucking approval. I don’t want any of it if this is what it costs.”
My father gives me a look that says he thinks I’m bluffing and opens his mouth. I cut him off before he gets the chance.
“And for the record, I know you can’t touch my trust anyway. If you came here hoping to scare me with that, save the drive next time.”
That one genuinely makes him blanch, because I know he hoped I had forgotten about the trust set up by my grandfather.
It’s the one piece of this family’s money not fully chained to obedience because the old bastard—for all his faults—believed in legal insulation from emotional stupidity.
My parents can freeze what they directly control. Not that.
I watch my father realize that his leverage is thinner than he thought.
“I’ll figure out the rest,” I say. “With or without you.”
My father’s voice goes cold enough to frost over. “You arrogant boy.”
“No,” I say. “I’m a father.”
The difference sits there between us—vast and impossible to bridge.
I think about Mila inside. About Julian taking her from the car without a word because I asked.
About the way she reaches for me now, trusting without question that I will hold her.
I think about how both of these people in front of me spoke about her as if she were a punishment instead of the best thing that ever happened to me in the middle of the worst.
“I want nothing to do with you,” I say. “After what you said about my daughter, after what you just implied about Brendon, after trying to use money to force me back into line, you are nothing to me. Do you understand that? Nothing.”
“Eli,” my mother whispers, and for the first time there’s real fear in it. Not fear for me. Fear of consequence. Of losing the script where parents can say anything and still expect the child to kneel for reconciliation later.
I do not kneel.
“Leave me and my daughter alone. Do not come back here. Do not call unless you’re prepared to apologize to her first. And if I ever hear you speak about her the way you did on that phone again, I will make sure you never get close enough to say it twice.”
My father’s face is unreadable now in the way men get when fury goes too deep to show cleanly. “You are making a mistake.”
“No,” I say, and the truth of it rings so hard through me I almost feel taller under it. “I already made my mistake—her name was Celeste. I’m done making them.”
My mother whispers, “Eli.”
I look at her one last time—at the woman who raised me, who kissed scraped knees and packed lunches and taught me prayers.
That doesn’t erase the fact that she stood in silence when my father would punish me with starvation before I was old enough to know what I did wrong.
She stood in silence again when he said the ugliest thing he could think of about my daughter.
I wanted her to choose me; that’s the grief in this. I wanted her to choose me, and she didn’t.
“Leave,” I say.
She starts crying properly then, quiet and broken. My father just stares at me, waiting for me to back down.
I don’t.
His jaw shifts, and my mother grabs his arm, urging retreat now, and for once, he lets himself be pulled. They turn in a way that’s still stiff with pride, still full of the righteous dignity they think matters more than love, and they walk back down the steps toward their car without another word.
I stand there until the engine starts and the car goes down the long drive and out past the gates.
Only then do I realize I’m shaking.
The front door opens behind me before I can even turn around. Julian’s voice comes first, low and careful. “Eli?”
I close my eyes for one second and let the sound of him move through me. Then I turn back toward the house, toward the people inside it, toward my daughter.
And I walk in without looking behind me again.