Chapter 4
I broke completely when I heard it. Not the performance of breaking, not the noise of it, just the total dissolution of everything I had been holding in the dark on that concrete floor. I gripped the cracked phone with both hands and I said the only sentence available to me.
"Dad. Please. Save me."
Inside the house, Arthur Sterling was back in his study. I know this because I know men like Arthur Sterling, and men like Arthur Sterling return to their studies after performing authority because the study is where authority lives, and what they do in the study afterward is the same thing they always do, which is pour the next drink and continue the evening as though the interruption has been resolved and the household has returned to its correct configuration. Julian was with him, tissue packed under his nose, both of them engaged in the specific comfort of men who have just exercised power without consequence, which is the comfort of laughter. The laughter of people who have already determined that a girl locked in a shed is the end of a story rather than the beginning of one.
They had made a number of assumptions to arrive at that determination.
They had assumed my father was who my mother had described him to be, which was a man who had been out of my life for long stretches and could not be counted on to show up at the right time. They had assumed that military service meant distance. They had assumed that a judge's property and a judge's name created a perimeter that a frightened phone call in the dark could not penetrate. They had assumed, most fundamentally, that when Arthur Sterling said no one is coming to save you, the sentence was accurate.
None of those assumptions held.
My father's name is Victor Vance. He had been a general in the United States Army for six years when my mother remarried and we moved into the Sterling house, and in the three years since he had kept a phone number active for me that went to a line monitored around the clock, because my father was a man who understood that the absence of a plan was itself a choice and that some plans needed to be made before they were needed.
May you like
The call lasted forty seconds.
He asked me two questions. I answered them. He told me to stay where I was and he ended the call and the phone went dark, and I sat in the dark shed with my back against the shelf and I breathed and I waited.
