Chapter 4Rigging My Father's Deadly Game

The house was dead silent.

My father stood in the center of the room, his breath coming in ragged, heavy pants.

He looked down at his wife's lifeless body on the rug. Then he looked at me, slumped against the wall, a line of warm blood trickling down my temple.

And then, he did something that will haunt me until the day I die.

He raised his hands and calmly, methodically, straightened the collar of his dress shirt.

He moved with the casual indifference of a man who had just finished taking out the trash. He cleared his throat and delivered his final, absolute verdict to the empty room.

"She was always too weak for this world."

My mother's funeral was a barren, clinical affair.

My father’s excuse was that she "preferred quiet settings." But I knew the truth. He didn't want to spend the money. Every penny saved on her casket was another penny going toward his golden child's Parisian tuition.

I knelt at the front of the empty funeral parlor, wearing a shapeless black dress, methodically tossing memorial cards into the small brazier. My face felt like a stone mask. I didn't shed a single tear. My grief had burned so hot it had calcified into something terrifyingly cold.

My father paced the back of the room with his hands clasped behind his back, acting like a regional manager inspecting a poorly performing retail branch.

He complained to the funeral director that the font on the program was too cheap, and that the floral arrangements were underwhelming.

My Uncle Dave, my mother's brother, couldn't take it anymore. He stepped up to confront him.

My father waved him off with a sneer of profound irritation.

"When you're dead, you're dead. What's the point of all this performative nonsense?" he scoffed. "If you've got so much energy to burn, you should focus on the living."

He turned his gaze toward Betty, who was sitting in the front row in an expensive black designer dress, scrolling mindlessly on her phone.

"Betty, sweetheart, did the school get your visa paperwork sorted? We can't let this little detour delay your future."

The entire room went dead silent.

The few extended relatives present stared at him as if he had just sprouted horns.

Uncle Dave, who had been chain-smoking in agonizing silence all morning, suddenly threw his cigarette to the floor.

"Richard! You psychotic son of a bitch!"

My father glanced at him, rolling his eyes. "What now? I'm securing my daughter's future. Is it a crime to be a good father?"

"I'll show you a goddamn future!"

Uncle Dave saw red. He lunged across the aisle, his fist connecting with my father's jaw with a sickening, meaty thud.

My father stumbled backward, knocking over a towering arrangement of white lilies before crashing to the floor.

He clutched his bleeding lip, screaming in disbelief. "You hit me?! Do you know who I am?!"

Uncle Dave stood over him, trembling with a rage so deep it looked like it was tearing him apart. "My sister was bled dry by you! You parasite! You killed her!"

"Lunatics! You're all lunatics!"

My father scrambled to his feet, furiously brushing the dust off his suit as if he were flicking away insects. "I am surrounded by irrational peasants!"

He glared at the room, spun on his heel, and walked out of the parlor.

He couldn't even be bothered to stay for the rest of his own wife's funeral.

After the service, I locked myself inside my mother's bedroom.

The air still smelled faintly of lavender and sterile rubbing alcohol. I moved through the room like a ghost, quietly packing up her life.

Her favorite flannel shirt. The wooden hairbrush she'd used for fifteen years.

I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her pillow to my chest, burying my face in it.

As I squeezed the fabric, something hard and sharp dug into my palm through the cotton casing.

Frowning, I grabbed a pair of scissors from the nightstand and sliced open the seams of the pillow.

Buried deep inside the dense memory foam was a tiny cloth pouch made from an old handkerchief.

I unrolled it. Inside were a handful of tightly folded, heavily creased Post-it notes.

They were written in my mother's handwriting.

The first note: "He used the box to decide Heather's after-school activities today... Why is it that the red slips always favor Betty?"

The second note: "I waited until he left and tried drawing from the box myself. It feels completely normal... Am I going crazy? Is it truly just fate?"

The third note: "He has a locked drawer in the oak desk. He told me never to touch it. What is he hiding? My chest feels tight just thinking about it."

My hands began to tremble violently.

The handwriting on the final note was frantic, jagged, the ink almost tearing through the yellow paper. It looked like the desperate scrawl of a woman running out of time.

When I read the words, the blood froze in my veins.