“Karen found the evidence, Sher! Cash stuffed in your dresser. Pill bottles in your closet. Text messages on a burner phone proving you were talking to dealers!”
I tried to explain. I tried to tell him I had never touched his wallet, never seen those pills, didn’t even know what a burner phone looked like. But the words died in my throat because I realized something horrible.
He wasn’t listening. He wasn’t looking for the truth; he was looking for a target.
Karen had spent the entire day preparing him, feeding him lies like poison wrapped in sugar. She stood there looking devastated, telling him she’d “tried so hard to help me,” that she “couldn’t watch her little sister destroy herself anymore.”
It was an Academy Award-worthy performance. And my father swallowed every single word like it was gospel truth.
He grabbed my arm—hard enough to leave bruises that would later be photographed by a crime scene unit—and dragged me toward the front door. My backpack was on the floor where I’d dropped it. He scooped it up and hurled it at my chest.
Then he opened the door.
The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees since morning. The rain was coming down in sheets, horizontal and stinging. Thunder rolled like artillery fire in the distance.
My father looked me dead in the eye. There was no love there. Only disgust.
“Get out of my house. I don’t need a sick daughter.”
He pushed me onto the porch. The door slammed. The deadbolt clicked.
And just like that, I was homeless.
