PART 2
“One more week in that camper and she’ll sign anything I put in front of her,” Tara said.
Ice clinked in a bag.
Then Rick’s voice. “And the trust?”
“Three hundred and ten thousand,” Tara said. “Amy’s life insurance. Wade’s the trustee, but once she’s in that program in Utah, I tell him it costs ten grand a month. He’ll make me co-trustee so I can pay the bills. He trusts me with everything.”
Rick laughed. “And the forty bucks?”
“You took it. I know you took it. Doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to believe a teenage girl over me.”
Amy’s mother put down her fork.
Amy’s father stood up.
My sister Joanne kept recording.
Nobody at the table said a word. We just listened.
“Wade’s gone three weeks a month,” Tara said. “By the time he figures anything out, she’ll be eighteen and the money will be gone. Just keep the heater unplugged. Cold makes kids quiet.”
I turned the monitor off.
My hands were steady. That surprised me.
The garage door opened. Tara walked in with a bag of ice and a big smile.
“Who’s ready for cake?”
Then she saw our faces.
Then she saw the monitor in front of me.
The bag of ice slid out of her hands.
“Where did you get that?”
“My daughter,” I said. “She’s been listening to you every night for five weeks.”
Kaylee pulled her old phone out of her other pocket.
“The other half is behind the paint cans in the garage,” she said quietly. “That’s where they go every night to smoke and talk. I recorded everything. I held my phone up to the speaker. Thirty-one nights.”
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Tara looked at me and put on her softest voice.
“Wade, honey, she’s twisting it. You know how she—”
“Get out,” I said.
“You can’t just—”
“Get out of my house. You and Rick. Tonight.”
Rick took one look at Amy’s father, a retired oil field foreman who was six foot three and still built like a refrigerator, and went to pack.
Tara turned to Joanne.
“Stop recording me!”
Joanne didn’t stop.
“The sheriff’s deputy is on his way,” she said. “I texted him ten minutes ago. Leaving a sixteen-year-old in an unheated camper at nineteen degrees has a name in Texas, Tara. It’s called child endangerment.”
The deputy arrived at 8:15.
He listened to two minutes of Kaylee’s recordings, looked at the camper in the backyard, and asked Tara to step outside.
The program in Utah got a call from my lawyer the next morning. So did Tara’s divorce attorney.
She didn’t get half the house.
She didn’t get a dime of Amy’s money.
Rick got arrested three weeks later for stealing from a convenience store in Canyon. Turns out the forty dollars wasn’t his first time.
That spring, I gave up long-haul.
I took a local route that gets me home every night by six. The pay is less. I don’t care.
Kaylee and I tore out the weight bench and the treadmill together. We painted her room the same pale yellow Amy picked out when she was born.
On the first night it was finished, Kaylee stood in the doorway holding the baby monitor.
“I don’t need this anymore,” she said.
She handed me the parent unit. Then she put the other half on her nightstand.
“But you can keep it,” she said. “Just in case you want to hear me sometimes.”
Some nights, I turn it on.
Mostly I just hear her humming. The same song her mother used to sing.
That’s enough.
THE END.
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Kids don’t always tell us when they’re hurting. Sometimes they just find a way to make us listen. 💛
Do you think Wade should have seen the signs sooner? Or did he do everything a father could? Tell us in the replies.
