Eviction Day came on a gray Friday.
I’d given them the full thirty days. I’d been patient.
In those thirty days, Dad had moved out.
That part surprised me.
At first, he stayed. He tried to play mediator. “Maybe we can all sit down and talk this out,” he’d say. “Maybe there’s a compromise.”
There wasn’t.
Tracy escalated. The jewelry stunt. The late-night phone calls to her friends painting me as a monster. The whispered conversations in the kitchen about how they’d “show me” after the eviction was “thrown out in court.”
Then he saw the footage.
Me, showing him on my laptop: Tracy slipping my mom’s necklaces into her purse.
His face crumpled.
“I can’t believe you’d do this,” he whispered to Tracy.
“If you’re taking her side,” Tracy said coldly, “maybe you should just go stay at a hotel.”
So he did.
He checked into a mid-range hotel off the highway. He called me from there a few times, quietly. He sounded exhausted.
“I didn’t know they’d left the house to you,” he said once. “I swear, Lucy. If I had—”
“You still let her treat me like a servant,” I said. “You still agreed to push me out. House or no house.”
He had no answer for that.
On Eviction Day, he wasn’t there.