Late one evening, the phone rang with an eerie shrill. I lifted the receiver, and a voice, frayed at the edges, whispered through the line—my daughter.
“Mum, it’s Emily. I’m in trouble! Richard kicked me out. I’ll arrive with Father in the morning. I’m coming home to stay.”
“Listen,” I said coolly, “there are no parents left, no home for you.”
“What?” she hissed, her breath sharp in the receiver. “What have you done?”
How could there not be a home? I’m your only daughter. I have a right to that house!” Emily wailed, her voice spiraling.
“Exactly,” I replied, “you have no house. We gave it to Eliza. She’s the mistress now. We don’t want you or Father. You are nothing to us.”
Call here again, and you’ll lose everything,” I declared, hanging up. What Emily had done had earned this.
Standing by the window, I remembered it all began with a phone call too.
Years ago, a muffled sob had jolted me awake at dawn.
“Margaret, it’s Anne.”
“Anne, what’s wrong? It’s the middle of the night.”
“I’m going into hospital. I need you, both of you. Don’t abandon Lucy. Please, not an orphanage.”
My sister Anne had always been a dreamer, her mind a patchwork of wild ideas. This, however, was a stitch too far.
I gripped the phone, heart racing, though I didn’t yet know the shape of the storm.
“Why now? What’s happening? Where are they taking you?”
Anne had kept her illness secret, long and silent. But as the weeks grew darker, her weight dissolved like ash. Her body, a canvas for pain.
“Margaret, the surgery could fail. Let Lucy stay with you,” she begged.
We were at the hospital within the hour. Lucy, all curled in a corridor corner, clung to her frayed teddy bear. “Will Mummy hurt?” she trembled. “No, sweetheart, Mummy will sleep.”
Four hours later, the surgeon emerged, his face a mask of dust.
“Anne went quickly.”
Lucy arrived in our lives like a ghost. I ushered her into Emily’s room. My daughter loomed, arms crossed, her silence a knife.
“Out,” she spat, shoving Lucy’s toys to the floor. “She’s not staying.”
We moved to the drawing room, giving her room to Lucy. Emily’s cruelty was a wall, but we let it stand. Two souls under one roof—both daughters to us, though only one bore blood.
Years melted. Emily married Victor, a financier with a silver tongue and an older man. It mattered not. She packed her things and vanished, giving no address.
Then the call: “Mum, don’t invite Eliza to the wedding. I won’t see her.”
“Emily, you can’t—”
“Eliza won’t come. Or you won’t either.”
I wept but resolved to book a cottage in Scarborough, leaving Emily’s vows to the sea.
Lucy, orphaned but tender, thrived. She inherited her mother’s artistic flair and a scholarship to Cambridge’s Ruskin. My husband Nicholas muttered about her similarities to Roger, the town’s reclusive painter, but I dismissed it. Lucy was ours.
When Nicholas fell ill, his skin a map of fever, we called Emily. Her response was a silence longer than the Atlantic.
“Alright, let me speak to Victor,” she said at last.
The hours crawled. She returned with her condition: a new car or no money.
“Emily, your father could die,” I implored.
“The world doesn’t end, Mum. Take a loan.”
But Lucy, hearing my sobs, proposed a solution. “Sell my flat. I’ll live with friends.”
We agreed, the transaction a lifeline. The medicine arrived, Nicholas recovered, and the flat, now his, bore Lucy’s name.
One night, the phone rang again. Emily’s voice, brittle: “I’m back. Victor left me.”
“Eliza is our daughter now,” I said, hanging up.
Years passed. Lucy married Stephen, a farmer in the Cotswolds. His fields stretched gold with crops, his dream a jam factory. We visited weekly, our days filled with tea, needlepoint, and Nicholas’s fishing tales.
I often thought of Emily on our annual trips to Scarborough, as Lucy had booked once more. The sea, relentless, reminded me. How did I raise a daughter who valuing luxury over life? And yet, Lucy, an orphan without a voice, had given us everything.
In the end, it was the dreams that lingered: house keys turning in phantom locks, voices bleeding into tides, and the weight of a world where grace wears no crown.
