The Situation Called For It

Chapter 5

Hayley

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Hayley shoveled a spoonful of food into her mouth and washed it down with the juice her brother had slid across the table, her eyes darting toward the staircase every few seconds. She wanted to see her father coming before he saw her. But she hoped he wouldn't come at all, which was why she kept eating so fast. Her mother would not let her leave without breakfast. If luck was on her side, she would slip out before he came down. If it wasn't...

The dining room smelled of fried plantain and strong coffee. Her mother, Maggie, had set the table the way she did every morning, as if a well-laid table could make a house peaceful. Lucien sat across from Hayley, scrolling his phone with one hand and pretending he wasn't listening for the stairs.

"Slow down," he muttered. "He's still in the shower."

"He's never in the shower long enough." Hayley swallowed. "Mum, I'm done. Please. I have to go."

"You haven't finished your eggs."

"I'll finish them in the taxi."

Maggie slid a foil-wrapped parcel across the table with a quick, guilty look at the door. "Then take this. It's only bread and cheese. Eat when you get there."

Hayley had just closed her fingers around it when the stairs creaked.

"There she is. Eating like an ex-convict again."

"Mikael..." Her mother tried to calm him, but he shot her a warning look, and she folded her hands in her lap.

"Good morning, sir." Hayley gave her father a smile that she wore like a coat that didn't fit.

Mikael came down the last step with a folded newspaper under his arm and his shirt already pressed, a broad, silver-haired man who walked into every room as though he had paid for it. He didn't look at his wife. He didn't look at Lucien. His attention was a spotlight, and it found Hayley and stayed, the way it always did, hot and unforgiving and impossible to hide from. She felt her shoulders curl inward before she could stop them.

"Were you gobbling your food so you could escape me again?"

"Of course not. I was trying to be on time." She set the spoon down. "My interview is at eight and I'm almost late."

It was half true. She did have an interview. It was scheduled for nine, not eight.

"And what sort of interview is this?"

"Dad, let her be." Lucien's chair scraped as he pushed back from the table. "You walk in on our breakfast and the first thing you do is start questioning her. Let her breathe."

"Shut up." Without so much as a glance at his son, her father turned to her. "Well?"

"If you must know, it's an internship at one of the big hospitals in town."

"An internship?" His lip curled. "Is that how you intend to repay me for the certificate I spent a fortune on?"

"It's a good start. Medicine isn't a field where you just apply and get a job overnight. I need the experience, and that's what an internship gives me."

He shook his head slowly. "I always knew training you was a waste of money. Your mother thought otherwise. Pity she'll have to die before she sees how wrong she was."

"Mikael, I am not dying!"

He took his seat at the head of the table and gulped his coffee as though no one had spoken. He didn't see his wife's hands trembling, or the cold glare his two children shared across the cutlery. Hayley had been at the receiving end of his temper for all twenty-seven years of her life, and it still felt as though her very existence was a sin he couldn't forgive.

The worst of it, the thing he abhorred above everything, was her talent. She could paint. She could draw a face so alive it seemed to breathe. Her father hated art with a passion that frightened her. Whenever she picked up a brush, he saw weakness. So he had sent her to medical school, the most expensive one he could find, hoping the lectures would flush the color out of her.

It hadn't worked. He found that out every time she came home with her medical textbooks, the margins crowded with sketches of her teachers, her school, her classmates. She had learned to hide them the way other girls hid diaries.

"I hear Sahel Ludwig is in town." Her father's eyes held hers over the rim of his cup.

Hayley shifted in her seat. "I'll be late for my interview, Dad."

"Of course you will. You always run off after the irrelevant things while the important ones slip through your fingers."

"Father, you can't live my life for me." The words left her before she could stop them.

"Then leave my house and take your worthless life somewhere else!" His fist came down on the table, and the plates rattled.

"Mikael!"

"Father!"

Hayley nodded, and she didn't wipe at the tears that had risen. "Why do you keep doing this to me? Ever since I was a child, I've lived with the reminder that I had to satisfy you. I've tried, every single day, to make you proud, and you only ever chose to see the worst in me."

"Because the worst in you outweighs the good!" His voice climbed until it seemed to rattle the windows, and beneath it she could hear the same cruelty that had echoed in her head for years. "You're a useless child, Hayley. A heap of wasted resources. At your age you're still unmarried and unemployed. You spend every day with those damned drawing books instead of looking for a real, paying job like your brothers and sisters and everyone else your age!"

"I gave up painting for medical school, for you!" Her voice rose to meet his, because she had finally had enough. "I studied for tests I hated and sat through exams that made me sick, and I'm out there right now looking for work to satisfy your pride, and you scorn me every single day."

"Then go! Get out and get a life!" He leaned over the table. "I'm done trying to make something of you. I'm done trying to make your pathetic, ungrateful backside useful. Go and live."

Hayley almost laughed. She thought of all the times she had tried to leave this house and the same man had stopped her, insisting he needed to watch her progress in medical school. Meanwhile, her four other siblings had found their footing. Some had married. Others had good jobs. Even Lucien, the youngest, had recently gotten engaged.

"Is this about Sahel?" Her chest ached. "Is that why you've finally decided to throw me out? Is that..."

"Aren't you just pathetic." Her father said it almost lazily. "Sahel Ludwig is only one of the many reminders of how much of a waste you are. That boy is rich and well connected, and you left him over some flimsy excuse. Now somebody else has him, and guess who suffers for it? Your poor mother. The worry is killing her, and I hope you can live with yourself when she's gone."

"Enough..." Her mother's tearful voice touched something raw in her. "You keep wishing me dead, Mikael. Leave the child alone, if God wills."

"Oh, shut up. The stone in your head is eating away what little sense you have left. God has nothing to do with this."

"That's enough." Lucien stood, and for the first time Hayley saw how tall her little brother had grown. "You can say what you like to us, Dad, but you don't talk to Mum like that. Not in front of me."

"Sit down, boy. This doesn't concern you."

"She's my mother. It concerns me." His voice shook, but he did not sit. "And she's my sister. All of this concerns me."

Mikael stared at him as though a stranger had spoken. For a heartbeat the room hung in silence, then he turned his glare back to Hayley, because it was easier to punish the daughter than to answer the son.

Maggie started crying silently. Lucien put an arm around her, glaring at their father. Hayley watched her mother's shoulders shake with a broken heart, and the hatred she felt for the man who had given her life twisted inside her.

"I was willing to marry Sahel, Father. You know I was." She broke into sobs. "But Lord knows I couldn't take his constant abuse. A man who saw me as a doll he needed to polish, who criticized my voice, my clothes, my friends, will do me no good no matter how rich he is. You of all people should understand that. You're the proof."

Mikael recoiled in shock. "You little imp! Did you just..."

"Yes. Father." She leaned on the title until it sounded like an insult. "And I'm done. I'm done with the nagging and the emotional abuse, and I'm done trying to please you. You call me pathetic, but I don't think anyone alive has ever been a better definition of the word than you."

Her mother and Lucien gasped, and she kept going.

"You hide in here and act like you are holier than everyone. In truth, you are just as much a constant reminder of your failures as I am, and you punish me for it. So tell me, why me? Of all your children, why me, Mikael?"

"Hayley, don't be disrespectful to your father."

"Oh, Mother, please." Her voice cracked. "For years we've watched you endure this tyrant's abuse. He jokes about your pain. He talks about your death like it's a weather report. I don't know about you, but I'm done."

"Get out!" Mikael roared. "I always knew you were no good."

She stood up, slowly. The chair legs scraped across the floor, and the whole room seemed to hold its breath. Her hand shook as she picked up her bag, but her voice did not.

"I'll leave. But you'll regret this day, Dad."

He didn't answer. He lifted his cup instead and went back to his coffee, as though she had already walked out of the room and out of his mind.

That was the part that hurt the most. Not the shouting. The way he could dismiss her so completely, and so easily, and sip coffee afterward.

She made it as far as the front door before footsteps pounded behind her. Lucien caught her by the elbow, breathless, his tie still hanging loose around his neck.

"Hay. Wait."

"Don't, Lucien. If you try to talk me into staying, I'll lose my nerve."

"I'm not going to talk you into staying. I'm going to help you leave." He pushed a thick folded envelope into her hand. "It's not much. It's what I saved for the wedding deposit. I'll earn it back."

"I can't take this."

"You can, and you will." His eyes were red. "Where will you go?"

"Logan's, for now."

"Logan's." He almost smiled, in spite of everything. "Of course. Call me when you get there. Promise me."

"I promise."

From the dining room came the sound of their mother's weeping, soft and helpless, and Hayley closed her eyes. Her mother had hugged her only once that morning, quickly, in the kitchen, with a spoon still in her hand. She had whispered, "Eat something, my child," like the world wasn't ending. It was her way of saying everything else.

"Look after her," Hayley said.

"I always do." Lucien hugged her hard enough to lift her off her heels. "Go and be someone he can't stand to look at, Hay. Be happy. That's the only revenge that works on men like him."

She nodded against his shoulder, her eyes burning, because her voice had left her. Then she squared her shoulders, opened the door, stepped out into the bright, indifferent morning, and did not look back at the house where she had spent twenty-seven years learning to be small.