Chapter 7 - Unearthing The Skeletons
The day before the deposition, I received an unexpected phone call.
The caller ID showed an out-of-state number.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Is this Maisie’s mother?” a gravelly voice asked.
“Who is this?”
“My name is Arthur Hale. I’m Evan’s uncle. Margaret’s brother.”
I froze.
I had never met Arthur.
Evan had always told me he was the "black sheep" of the family and was not to be discussed.
“Why are you calling me?” I asked defensively.
“I saw the video,” Arthur said.
His voice sounded heavy with regret.
“I saw what she did to your little girl.”
“And I saw Evan just sit there.”
“It made me sick.”
“Because it’s exactly what she used to do to Evan when he was a boy.”
I stopped breathing for a second.
“What?” I whispered.
“Margaret is a monster,” Arthur continued.
“She ruled that house with an iron fist.”
“She hit Evan for crying. She hit him for spilling things.”
“She beat the spirit out of that boy until he was nothing but a shell.”
“I tried to stop her once. She had me arrested for trespassing and cut me out of the family.”
Tears welled in my eyes.
Suddenly, Evan’s frozen reaction made a horrifying kind of sense.
He wasn’t just ignoring it.
He was paralyzed.
He was a little boy all over again, terrified of the woman at the head of the table.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.
“Because I have proof,” Arthur said.
“I kept old letters. Medical records from when Evan ended up in the ER as a kid.”
“I’m overnighting them to your lawyer.”
“Don't let her do to your daughter what she did to my nephew.”
“Break the cycle.”
When I hung up, I wept.
I wept for the boy Evan had been.
But my pity did not change the present.
Trauma explains behavior; it does not excuse it.
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He had chosen to let his mother pass that trauma down to our daughter.
And I was the one who was going to stop it.
