Chapter 2: The Knock on the Door
By midday, the crisis had escalated from an internal glitch to a full-blown corporate catastrophe. Local news outlets and financial blogs were beginning to pick up whispers of sudden, inexplicable work suspensions across major state infrastructure sites.
I was sitting in a quiet corner booth of a twenty-four-hour diner three towns over, nursing a black coffee and reviewing my physical therapy exercises, when my phone chimed with an unknown local number.
I ignored it. It chimed again. Then a text message came through.
“Sarah, please pick up. This is insane. Your mother and I have reporters outside our house. What did you do?”
It was my father.
The irony was thick enough to cut with a combat knife. Barely twenty-four hours after slamming their front door in my face because David called them first to label me “unstable,” the reality of who held the actual power in our family had come crashing down on their doorstep.
Ten minutes later, my phone rang again. This time, it was my mother. Her voice was shaking, stripped of the cold, dismissive tone she had used when she looked at my uniform and my suitcase.
“Sarah? Sweetheart, are you there?” she stammered, the panic palpable in every syllable. “Your father and I… we didn’t understand. David called us again this morning, screaming that the federal government had seized his company assets, and then reporters showed up asking about your military clearance. What is happening?”
I took a slow sip of my coffee, keeping my voice entirely even, devoid of anger or warmth.
“You told me yourself last night,” I replied quietly. “You’re staying out of my marriage. And by extension, my business.”
“Sarah, please, don’t be like that,” my mother pleaded, the sound of a camera shutter clicking faintly in the background through her phone speaker. “He’s your husband. You need to fix this. They’re saying the company might go bankrupt by the end of the week.”
“Let it,” I said, and ended the call.
I blocked both of their numbers, along with David’s, Marcus Vance’s, and the corporate legal team’s. They had made their choices based on convenience and superficial success. Now, they would learn what real gravity felt like.
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