The True Heiress's Revenge: Exposing My Toxic Family on Live TV novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Seventy-Four Million

Demi's father got up out of the gravel slowly, one hand on his knee.

Then he did the thing Demi had known he would do from the moment the old woman opened her coat.

He looked for someone to blame.

"If she had told us where she was," he said hoarsely, "if she had fought harder, if she had sent one letter..."

"One letter?" Demi said.

"You were gone twenty years. You could have found a phone."

The kind camera operator moved a half step closer.

"I was in a cabin with no road," Demi said. "I was seven when she showed me what happens to a girl who goes for the door. I was nine when I stopped asking."

"Don't make excuses for yourself."

"I have never made one."

Her mother walked past him.

She walked straight to Demi, and her face was wet and had come apart in a way Demi had never seen.

For three months she had held that face tight, and now it was only a face.

"I put out a plate for you," her mother said. "Every birthday, for years. I kept your room."

"Celia had my room," Demi said.

Her mother flinched as if she had been slapped.

"I did not know."

"You did not look."

"I looked."

"For how long?"

Her mother's mouth opened and closed.

Demi waited.

"Two years," her mother said finally. "Then they said you were gone. Then there was Celia."

Behind her, her father made a sound of protest.

"Don't," he said. "You do not have to answer her. Not in front of the whole country."

"Yes," her mother said, without turning. "I do."

She sank to her knees on the gravel in front of Demi, in her good dress, in front of every lens.

"I am so sorry," she said. "I hit you. I let your brother hit you. I told you to be grateful. I will say it as many times as you want."

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