My Father S:mash:ed a Brick Into My Face After My Fiancé Refused to Leave Me for My Sister, and My Mother Just Laughed. “Let's See If He Still Loves You Now.” I Didn't Scream.
At the Hospital, I Asked Them to Preserve the Evidence, Never Imagining That Six Witnesses and an Old Will Would Destroy Them. “Let's see if Wyatt still loves you with that face,” my mother said, laughing in a way I'll never forget.
The brick h:it me before I even saw my father's arm swing.
One second earlier, I had been standing on the cracked sidewalk outside my parents' house in the neighborhood where I grew up in Columbus, wearing the light blue dress I'd bought to announce our wedding date during a family dinner. The next second, everything turned white.
A dull, sickening crack, like something breaking deep inside. I felt warmth running down my left eyebrow, across my cheek, and over my lips. My fiancé, Wyatt Campbell, caught me before my face hi:t the porch steps. “Sadie, look at me. Stay with me!
Sadie!” I tried to open my left eye. With my right eye, I saw my mother, Brenda, standing beside the old porch swing. She didn't run toward me. She didn't call for an ambulance. My father, Gregory Davis, dropped the broken half of the brick onto the grass.
“I war:ned you,” he muttered calmly, as if he had just shut a door instead of s:mash:ing his daughter's face. Wyatt stared at him in disbelief. Then my younger sister, Melanie, stepped out of the front door.
She wore an expensive dress, freshly manicured nails, and an irritated expression, as though my bl00d had ruined dinner. “I told you she wouldn't move,” she said, folding her arms. “We tried talking to her nicely.” Wyatt gently leaned me against one of the porch columns before standing up.
My father smiled and pointed at Melanie. “No. You're just engaged to the wrong daughter.” The ringing in my head was unbearable, but those words hurt even more than the brick. “Melanie should have been the one you chose,” my mother said. “Sadie is selfish.
She always has been.” Melanie looked down at me lying on the ground. “And you still chose her.” Wyatt pulled out his phone to call 911, but my father ki:cke:d it out of his hand. The screen shattered against the front steps.
“No one's calling anybody.” Wyatt shoved him. Even though my father was already in his sixties, he lunged at Wyatt like a cornered animal. They crashed into the rose bushes. Neither my mother nor Melanie screamed. They just watched, as though everything had been planned.