Chapter 18 - The Broken Patriarch
“Willa?”
Richard Vance’s voice sounded hollowed out, stripped of the booming, country-club confidence that had once filled country estate dining rooms and private club verandas. He sounded like an old man speaking from the bottom of an abandoned well.
“Hello, Richard,” I said. My voice was level, measured, and completely calm.
A sharp, ragged intake of breath came through the receiver.
“They... they gave me five minutes for my personal call,” he stammered. “I’m at the federal detention facility in Oxford. The sentencing hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday.”
“I know,” I said. “Arthur Sterling’s legal team informed me.”
“Willa, please...” The sound of a grown man, a man who had once stood beneath my college graduation banner laughing at my plain face, beginning to weep openly over a prison telephone was both pathetic and profoundly tragic. “Your mother won't speak to me. Her public defender says she’s completely detached from reality. She sits in her cell singing pageant songs from when Blythe was eight years old.”
A cold knot formed in my stomach, but I remained silent, letting him speak.
“And Blythe...” Richard’s voice cracked into a sob. “I called the clinic in Illinois. They have her on suicide watch, Willa. She won't eat. She keeps scrubbing her hands in the sink until they bleed because she says there’s lake mud under her fingernails.”
“Why are you calling me, Richard?” I asked softly.
The silence returned for three long seconds, heavy with the weight of thirty years of cowardice.
“I wanted to apologize,” Richard whispered, the words coming out cracked and broken. “Not for the money. Not for the firm. God knows I deserve to die in this place for what I did to my partners.”
He took a shaking breath.
“I wanted to apologize for the graduation, Willa.”
The words hit the quiet dining room like cold water.
“Thirteen years ago,” Richard said, his voice trembling violently. “I stood beneath that banner and I laughed. I laughed because Eleanor told me to laugh. I let her cut you out of the picture because I was weak. Because it was easier to let her worship Blythe and ignore you than it was to be a real father to the daughter who actually had my mother’s soul.”
A single tear slipped down my cheek, hot and silent. I didn't wipe it away.
“You were brilliant, Willa,” Richard wept. “You were the smartest, bravest, most decent person this rotten family ever produced. And I stood there and let them treat you like dirt because I wanted to keep up appearances at a country club that didn't give a damn about any of us.”
I closed my eyes, listening to the muffled sobs of the man who had abandoned me to the wolves for thirteen years.
“I forgive you, Richard,” I said quietly.
He gasped, a sound of desperate, undeserved relief catching in his throat. “Willa... really? You forgive me?”
“Yes,” I said, opening my eyes to look at Reid, who was watching me with fierce, quiet respect across the table. “I forgive you for being weak. I forgive you for laughing. And I forgive you for failing to protect me.”
I paused, letting the silence settle between us.
“But forgiveness is not reconciliation, Richard. You made your choices. You chose Eleanor’s vanity over your daughter’s dignity. You chose fraud over honor. And now you have to serve your time.”
“Willa, please—don't hang up—”
“Goodbye, Richard,” I said softly. “I hope you find peace in that cell. Because for the first time in my life, I have found it out here.”
I lowered the phone and tapped the red disconnect button, setting the device face-down on the table.
Reid reached across the linen, taking both of my hands in his.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his voice thick with concern.
I looked at him, feeling the tear on my cheek dry in the warm air of the restaurant. The ghost that had haunted my heart since that graduation party—the ghost of the girl who thought she wasn't good enough to be loved—finally dissolved into nothingness.
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“I’m better than all right, Reid,” I said, a clear, beautiful smile breaking across my face. “I’m free.”
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