"You do remember Brian, right? So I said we went to the golf park together. On the way, I noticed something was bothering him immensely, or at least that's what I thought. When he got to the park and I finally asked him, he told me the information he was about to reveal could destroy my life but he also thought that I had to know. He told me you weren't my daughter and that my wife cheated on me. When I refused to believe this, he played me a recording on his phone he claimed he'd received from an unknown number two weeks ago on his business trip but couldn't bring himself to send to me."
Her father dragged in a shaky breath as if in reminiscence of that day, while Emma just stared at him silent and stunned. The probability that her life was a lie hung on her like a bleak cloud.
"It was a call recording of your mother, and her. . . and her lover. In it, she began with how much she loved and missed him. He asked about you, calling you his daughter. Your mother after telling him that you're fine said she was tired of pretending that she still loved him and couldn't wait for the day he finally arrived so the three of you could run away together." His breaths grew slightly heavy.
A jolt sizzled through Em. "What are you trying to tell me? That I'm not your daughter?" She asked, trying to hold back the panic that pulled at the fringes of her control.
"No." He sighed. "But you can only imagine how it felt."
Relief sagged through her, but she couldn't force back the lump of emotion rising in her throat for the fact that her father had once doubted her identity. "You simply believed him. You didn't even think of having a DNA done?"
"I did, Emma. But at that time I was dreading the reality so much that I didn't have it conducted myself. Instead, I gave him the samples, a lock of your hair and mine. He returned two days later with a negative result. It shattered my whole life, my world."
Emma jutted to her feet, pacing up and down, wanting to digest all these information that had hit her so hard with their suddenness. After a while, she faced her father. "I'm pretty sure my mother must've denied this and you chose to doubt her. You never trusted her or the love you two had. You chose to believe a best friend who could've altered the test results."
"I thought that Brian had absolutely no reason to lie to me!" He cried desperately, voice quavering with emotion. "He and I had been best friends for practically all my life and I thought he loved me and was only looking for my happiness. I never thought that he'd decieved me. And I still don't get what reason he had to destroy my happiness, the jerk."
Suddenly there was a memory that had Emma pausing; one of Brian forcibly trying to kiss her mother. When her mother pushed and slapped him, he begged her to divorce her father and come to him. He seemed drunk when that happened.
Her mother slapped him several times to get him to his senses, stating her heart only belonged to her father. The man apologized after realizing what he'd just done and begged her mother to not tell her husband.
As the memory receded, Em stared at her father, seeing the shame in his eyes. "He had a reason!"
"Huh?"
"He was in love with my mother! I heard him begging my mum one day to divorce you and be with him. He had no regard for what that could do to your friendship, he never cared about you or your feelings."
"What?" Her father's voice was laced with shock, and as the reality probably sunk in, pure, unadulterated hatred flashed in his eyes. "The bastard son of a bitch." He jolted to his feet and grabbed a ceramic cup on the table, throwing and smashing it against the wall.
Pacing, he ruffled his hair furiously, the hurt and shock and denial radiating off him, his tears so compounding it pulled out her own. "I can't believe how stupid I was. I can't believe that I never saw the chink in his armour, that I never saw right through his lies and deception. And there I was, mourning and pitying him for the horrible way he died. I wish he were here so I could make his death even more painful."
Suddenly he dropped to his knees as his body shook, clutching her by a leg. "Please forgive me, daughter. I'm sorry. I wish your mother were here so I could beg her too, but can't get that. Oh God, she told me. She told me several times that you. . . that you were my daughter, that she never cheated on me, but whenever I beat her and she kept telling me she loved me, it infuriated me even more."
Suddenly, Emma was nine years old again, teleported into the past, watching from the shadows as her father's fists connected with her mother's face, abdomen. Kicking her while she lay crouched on the floor repeatedly declaring her love for solely him.
And it came as a stunning reminiscence; her father using continually for her mother that one word her agitated mind all those times had refused to pick - whore.
It all made sense now; her father's sudden change years ago, the abuses, his hostility and estrangement towards her before and after her mother's death.
"You deserve no forgiveness!" She plucked her legs from his hold, stepping back. "You deserve nothing after you chose to believe a piece of paper over my mother's words. After you threw the love you two shared to the bin and resorted to abusing her. After you chose to believe I wasn't your daughter and only communicated with me through other people. After you cut me out of your life and didn't bother to know how mine went."
She spoke with all the pent up hatred she was only now being given the opportunity to splay, while her father continued to cry and she couldn't hold back her tears. Together they were a crying misfit because they both had different reasons for crying. Him for regret, and her for indignation.
"You based your abuses on a lie. Because of a lie, you killed my mother!"
Her father's head which had been bowed in shame, jerked up, and he looked at her stunned, shock characterising his tearful facial expression. "What?"
"What? You thought I would never figure it out? That I'll continue to believe that she died because of the brain tumor you guys claimed? I know that you killed her!"
"What are you saying?" He asked, seemingly poleaxed. His voice was threaded with hurt, incredulity. "I didn't kill your mother."
"Maybe you didn't." She looked down at him spitefully. "But your many abuses must've been what had triggered her death."
"Your mother had a brain tumour!" He said defensively. "I swear I never knew about it. I never knew that she was set to have surgery in three days. I merely beat her as usual when she tried to come close to me. I didn't know she was perhaps trying to tell me, I swear it."
"You swear it? You swear it? You didn't listen to her so you triggered her death anyway when you beat her." She felt the sadness digging into her heart, the emotions cutting through her flesh, causing her to bleed in unimaginable ways. the realities she'd discovered intensifying that torture.
"Please, please forgive me. I can't live without your forgiveness. I beg you daughter."
She chuckled mirthlessly. "It's funny you think you now have a daughter after 15 years of disowning her. Do you know all the things my traumatic past did to me? The happiness it stripped from me later on?"
She released a shaky breath to calm herself down. "Tell me, just how and when did you suddenly discovered that your best friend had lied to you, that you'd destroyed your marriage for nothing?"
"It was through Zain. He came to California on Sunday to demand explanations about my reasons for destroying our family. He instigated enough doubts that I agreed to have another DNA test conducted. He brought a lock of your hair. "
"How did he get it?" She asked, confused.
"He said something about using your daughter to distract you so he could cut it." He replied, fidgeting a little since he was still on his knees.
Emma nodded, finally realizing why Zain had been acting so strange that Sunday night. She looked at her father, feeling a new surge of venom stream through her veins. "So had Zain not intervened, you would've never ever bothered to reconnect with me. You would've gone on and died thinking my mother had betrayed you. You would've died thinking I wasn't your daughter."
Tired and weary, she merely sighed. The emotions were too much to take, and she was finally feeling the gravity of them. Besides, if she needed to do what she was about to do, she couldn't allow him to see her cry.
"Can you do me a favour?" She asked, wiping her tears and holding the approaching ones back.
"Of course." Her father looked up at her with hopeful anticipation.
"I need you to forget that Zain ever came to you. That he made you finally believe that I'm your daughter. I need you to pretend that this moment never happened, to go back and continue your life with your family still believing that my mother cheated on you and that I'm not your daughter."
"Dear, I can't do that." He retorted sadly.
"Look at me dad. I'm thirty years old, married and with a three year old daughter. I've successfully survived 15 years without you. So have you without me. We don't need to change things. Go back and forget that you have a daughter, a son in law, and a granddaughter. I don't need you in my life."
Her father finally got to his feet. "Fine. If that's what you want." Sadness ricocheted from his voice, the kind that currently resonated in her soul. "I'll get out of your life and never return. I'll go back to California today. I'm immensely sorry for all the pain I've caused you, daughter. I'm. . . I'm sorry." He let out a burdened sigh, a burden she vindictively hoped he would never be free from.
"I hope you'll find a place in your heart to forgive me some day."
Picking her handbag from the couch, she looked at him one last time, before walking out and closing the door behind her.