“Hey, Dad. Are you okay? You look really pale.”
For several long seconds, I simply stood there, trying to reconcile the girl standing in front of me with the shadowy figure I’d just seen on those recordings.
Finally, I managed to ask,
“Have you ever gone into my bedroom while I wasn’t home?”
Her smile disappeared instantly.
“What?”
“Just answer me.”
She slowly straightened in her chair.
“No. Why would I?”
My hands had begun to shake.
“Money is missing from my safe.”
Confusion flashed across her face first.
Then fear.
Then anger.
And that anger was so unmistakably Avery that it almost broke my heart.
“Wait… are you accusing me?”
“I don’t want to,” I admitted honestly. “But I need an explanation. Someone wearing a gray hoodie was caught on the security camera.”
“A gray hoodie?”
She stared at me for a long moment before quietly walking over to her closet. Sliding the hangers aside, she searched through the clothes, then turned back toward me.
“My oversized gray hoodie has been missing for two days.”
I blinked.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s gone. I thought it was in the laundry… or maybe you washed it. But it’s completely disappeared.”
A cold knot settled deep in my chest.
I hurried downstairs.
Marisa was standing in the kitchen, calmly pouring herself a glass of water as though she hadn’t just detonated a bomb in the middle of my life.
“Avery’s gray hoodie is missing,” I said.
She didn’t even flinch.
“So?”
“That means the person in the video could have been anyone.”
She tilted her head, giving me a look that bordered on disbelief.
“You can’t seriously believe that.”
And then something clicked.
Months earlier, she’d joked about me keeping a safe in the house. She had also been the one who insisted we install security cameras—”just in case,” she’d said.
I pulled out my phone and opened the security system app—the very one she had configured herself.
I scrolled through the earlier recordings.
Then I saw it.
Only minutes before the hooded figure entered my bedroom, another camera captured Marisa walking down the hallway.
She was carrying Avery’s gray hoodie.
Every muscle in my body tightened.
I opened the next recording.
Marisa walked into my bedroom, opened the dresser drawer, knelt beside the safe…
…and then lifted something toward the camera with a small, satisfied smile.
Cash.
I slowly turned my phone so she could see the screen.
“Explain this.”
The color drained from her face.
For only a split second.
Then her expression hardened into something cold and unfamiliar.
“You don’t understand,” she hissed. “I was trying to save you.”
“By framing my daughter? By stealing from me? Have you completely lost your mind?”
“She ISN’T your daughter!” she shouted.
There it was.
The truth.
The real reason behind everything.
“She’s not your blood,” Marisa continued, her voice shaking with anger. “You’ve poured your entire life into her. Your money. Your home. Her future. And for what? So she can turn eighteen, walk away, and forget you ever existed?”
Everything inside me suddenly became perfectly still.
“Leave,” I said quietly.
Marisa let out a bitter laugh.
“So you’re choosing her over me.”
“Get out. Right now.”
She took one slow step backward and reached into her handbag.
At first, I assumed she was grabbing her keys.
Instead, she pulled out a small velvet ring box.
The very one I’d hidden inside my nightstand.
A smug smile spread across her face.
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you were planning to propose.”
Then she added,
“You can keep your little charity project. But I’m not walking away empty-handed.”
She headed toward the front door as though the house belonged to her.
I caught up to her, snatched the ring box from her hand, and threw the front door open so forcefully that it slammed against the wall.
Standing on the porch, she turned around one last time.
“Remember what I told you,” she said coldly. “One day she’ll break your heart.”
Then she walked away.
Even after locking the door, my hands refused to stop shaking.
I turned around.
Avery was standing halfway down the staircase.
Pale.
She had heard every word.
“Dad…” she whispered. “I never wanted…”
“I know, sweetheart.”
I crossed the room in two quick strides and wrapped my arms around her.
“I know you didn’t do any of it.”
She quietly began to cry, almost as though she felt guilty for something she’d never done.
“I thought you’d believe her.”
I held her the same way I had held her thirteen years earlier, when she was only three years old and the world had once again tried to steal her home.
“I’m so sorry I even questioned you,” I whispered into her hair. “But listen to me carefully. No job, no relationship, and no amount of money is worth losing you. Nothing in this world.”
She wiped away a tear.