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Confused, I looked down, saw that my fists were curled tight, and could see the blood starting to pool in my palms.
I released the grip that I hadn’t even realized I had and saw Elias’s nod of approval.
“That’s a good first step. Now—”
Amethyst walked in, looking annoyed, with Kayla right at her side. “He can’t take the fucking hint,” she muttered, her irritation even clearer now.
“What is it?” I asked, alarmed.
“My father has called me three times in a row. That man is nothing but a nuisance, and I—”
She froze, the shock on her face mirroring what I felt.
Her lids lowered and she took a deep breath. When something like serenity, or as close as she could get to it, settled on her face, she answered the phone.
“Amy, what took you so long to answer?” I heard Raphael ask. She’d put the phone on speaker, and his voice boomed through the almost empty room.
And sent the anger I’d been fighting to suppress up at least five more notches.
“Daddy, what do you need?” she said, her voice sounding like I had never heard it before.
The tone was somewhere between disbelief, heartbreak, and anger of the sort I didn’t think she was capable of.
“You sound down,” he said, his voice practically oozing through the speaker.
Then next came a sound that both relieved me and filled me with anger and sadness.
Crystal’s familiar cry.
“But I think I have something that might make you feel better,” Raphael said.
* * *
Amethyst
I stared at the phone,not sure what I expected to see.
But I knew what I had heard.
It was Crystal.
I wasn’t sure how I knew.
A baby’s cry was a baby’s cry, right?
But I did know—knew as much as I knew anything—that it was her.
And she was with my father.
I stared at the phone intently, like it held some message I needed to decode.
All it was was a black rectangle, but one that was my only connection, however tenuous, to my daughter.
“Where are you?” I asked.
I was pleased that my voice only trembled at the end, but I knew it was all a front.
He knew exactly what this was doing to me. I didn’t doubt that for a second.
