“Chloe, I need you to listen to me very carefully right now,” I said with a firm and commanding tone.
“Do not put a single item of your clothing into that bag and do not let them touch your things.”
“Go to your bathroom immediately, lock the door from the inside, and do not open it for anyone until I get there.”
“But Grandma said that Dad had already agreed to this arrangement this morning,” Chloe replied with a trembling voice.
“She said that this house belongs to her son and that you have no say in what happens here.”
I felt a dry, burning fury rise from my stomach to my throat as I processed her words. My mother-in-law, Evelyn, had treated me like an unwelcome stranger in my own marriage for over a decade.
To her, her son Lucas was a perfect man who could do no wrong, while her daughter Kimberly was a perpetual victim of bad luck. She always referred to me as the lucky accountant who had managed to trick her son into a stable life.
Kimberly was currently drowning in massive credit card debt and was pregnant with her fourth child by a man she barely knew. She was estranged from her husband, Derek, and she was convinced that our family was obligated to rescue her from her own poor choices.
But entering my private home to scare my young daughter was a line that I would never allow them to cross. I walked out of the office building without asking for permission from my boss or saying a word to my team.
As I was going down in the elevator, I dialed Lucas’s number with shaking fingers.
“Your mother and your sister are in our apartment right now,” I told him the moment he picked up the phone.
“They are literally dragging Chloe out of her own bedroom and throwing her things away,” I added with a voice that was shaking with pure rage.
There was a long, icy silence on the other end of the line that made my heart race even faster.
“I am heading there right now,” Lucas replied with a tone that was lower and more serious than I had ever heard before.
When I finally arrived at our building, I saw a large, rusty moving truck parked illegally right in front of the main entrance. Next to the elevator, I spotted Chloe’s colorful backpacks, her favorite sneakers, and her school books piled up on the sidewalk.
A box filled with her precious drawings was sitting there, and her art supplies were scattered around like pieces of worthless trash. On top of the box, someone had taped a piece of white paper with the words “Baby’s Room” written in thick red marker.
I could not believe that this was actually happening in front of my own eyes. I ran up the four flights of stairs because the elevator was taking far too long to descend.
When I finally threw open the apartment door, I found the living room completely overrun with piles of dirty boxes and stained blankets. An old, dusty stroller was parked right in the middle of the hallway where we usually kept our shoes.
Kimberly was sitting comfortably in my expensive white armchair while rubbing her belly with the smug expression of a queen. My mother-in-law, Evelyn, was standing in the kitchen barking orders at a pair of movers as if she were dividing up a massive inheritance.
“Be careful not to scratch that dining table because we can definitely use that one for the kids,” Evelyn shouted.
“And make sure you take away all those silly girly decorations because they take up way too much space in this room.”
“Where is my daughter right now?” I shouted at the top of my lungs to get their attention.
