My father hadn’t made a rash decision at a dinner table. He’d been systematically erasing my future for months.
Tyler took photos with his friend’s phone and sent them to me. I sat on Eleanor’s couch and scrolled through image after image—envelopes with my name on them, opened, read, and hidden by the man who was supposed to protect me.
And then, at the bottom of the folder, Tyler found something else.
A congratulations card addressed to me, postmarked eight years ago. The handwriting was unfamiliar. The return address was in Philadelphia.
It was from my aunt Patricia—my mother’s sister. The woman Gerald told me wanted nothing to do with us after the funeral. The woman he said had moved on and forgotten about you.
She’d written: “Karen, honey, congratulations on starting high school. Your mama would be so proud. I think about you every single day.”
“Love, Aunt Patty.”
Eight years.
He’d kept her from me for eight years.
“I don’t want to be like him, Karen,” Tyler said, and his voice broke on my name.
Gerald did not vacate the house.
Thirty days came and went. He stayed on Maple Street like a man who believed that stubbornness was the same as a legal right.
So Eleanor and David Mercer filed for formal eviction with the magisterial district court, and a hearing was scheduled for a Tuesday morning three weeks later.
The courtroom, if you could call it that, was a small room in the municipal building off Route 6. Fluorescent lights, wood-paneled walls, an American flag in the corner that leaned slightly to the left, five rows of wooden benches for spectators, a raised desk for the judge.
No jury. Just people and paper.
Gerald sat on the left side with Craig Weiss. He was wearing a dress shirt—light blue, ironed—the first time I’d ever seen him in anything but flannel or a work polo. Khaki pants with a sharp crease, but his work boots peeked out beneath the cuffs, scuffed and familiar.
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