A Thanksgiving Dinner Served with Poison

§PROLOGUE

The first thing I remembered was the lie.

A tremor in my father’s voice over the phone, thick with a manufactured despair that, at the time, I had mistaken for love.

“I have cancer, Maren.”

That was ten years ago.

I was twenty-five, naive enough to believe that blood was thicker than betrayal.

I signed the guarantor forms for the million-dollar loan.

For his treatment, he’d said.

To live long enough to walk me down the aisle, he’d wept.

To fulfill my mother’s dying wish.

The bank approved the loan.

And then, he was gone.

A suicide note was all he left behind.

A fabricated story of a devastating online scam, of losing everything.

He even scammed me out of the house my mother had left solely to me.

The debt fell on my shoulders like a collapsed building.

The loan sharks came first, their knuckles rapping against a door that was no longer mine.

They threw my things onto the lawn of the Port Sterling house I grew up in.

I worked three jobs.

My hands, once soft, became calloused and raw.

My back, once straight, began to stoop under the weight of exhaustion.

The lines on my face deepened, carving a map of sleepless nights and relentless anxiety.

At thirty-five, I looked fifty-five.

A ghost haunting the periphery of a life I was supposed to live.

It was Thanksgiving Eve when I saw him.

Ten years to the day.

I was delivering a catering order, the scent of roasted turkey and cinnamon clinging to my worn-out coat.

Through the window of a cheerful, brightly-lit suburban home, I saw a scene of domestic bliss.

A man, his hair silvered and distinguished, was carving the turkey.

He was laughing, his face ruddy with health and happiness.

It was my father.

A woman with a predatory prettiness stood beside him, her hand resting possessively on his arm.

And a young man, barely out of his teens, beamed at them both.

His son. Her son.

The happy family, paid for with my life.

The lie wasn't the cancer.

The lie was me. I was the scam.

Rage, cold and pure, flooded the hollow spaces inside me.

I fumbled for my phone, my fingers trembling.

911.

They saw me then.

Their laughter froze.

Panic contorted their perfect family portrait.

They rushed out, not with explanations, but with violence.

He shoved me. The father who had used my mother’s memory to destroy me.

She pushed me. The mistress who had slept in my mother’s house.

The son, the replacement, gave the final, brutal heave.

I stumbled backward, off the curb, into the path of an oncoming truck.

The world became a kaleidoscope of blinding headlights and the grotesque screech of tires.

I didn't feel the impact.

Only the crushing.

A methodical, grinding finality as bone splintered and snapped.

The last thing I heard, over the sound of my own body breaking, was their unified sigh of relief.

The last thing I saw was the gentle fall of snow, beginning to cover their tracks.

And then, nothing.

Until...

§01

The phone rang.

And I was alive.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, impossible drumbeat.

I was sitting at my desk, the bland beige of my office cubicle surrounding me like a flimsy shield.

The afternoon sun of a mild November day streamed through the window, glinting off the framed photo of my mother.

She was smiling.

My phone buzzed again, insistent.

The caller ID displayed a single word: Dad.

My breath hitched.

The phantom agony of crushed ribs and shattered limbs pulsed through me, a visceral echo in a body that was inexplicably whole.

Twenty-five.

I was twenty-five again.

My hands were smooth. My back was straight. The crushing weight of a million-dollar debt was a future nightmare, not a present reality.

A second chance.

Not from heaven, but from sheer, impossible luck.

And I wouldn’t waste a single second of it.

I answered the phone, my voice a carefully controlled, neutral tone.

“Maren?”

The voice was the same.

That practiced tremor, that undercurrent of staged desperation.

“You need to come to the clinic. Now.”

The lie.

It was beginning.

“I have cancer, Maren.”

A cold, beautiful calm settled over me.

“Stay there,” I said, my voice devoid of the panic he expected. “I’m on my way.”

But I wasn't going to the clinic.

Not yet.

I grabbed my bag, gave my boss a clipped excuse about a family emergency, and walked out into the crisp Oregon air.

My first stop was home.

The house my mother had fought to keep, the one she had explicitly willed to me.

Its warm, familiar rooms were still mine.

His things were still in the master bedroom, a temporary stain I intended to scrub out.

I didn't waste time on sentiment.

I went straight to the old roll-top desk in the study.

Inside, beneath a stack of my mother’s gardening journals, were the two documents that mattered.

The property deed, with my name on it.

And her last will and testament, notarized and ironclad.

He had told me it was lost in a fire. Another lie.

This time, there would be no fire.

I drove to a bank downtown and rented a safe deposit box.

The documents slid into the cool, metal container with a satisfying finality.

I locked it, the key feeling heavy and powerful in my palm.

The fortress was secure.

Now, it was time to meet the enemy at the gates.

§02

The Wellness Clinic was a place designed to look like money and smell like discretion.

It occupied a discreet brick building in a high-end suburb, catering to those who valued privacy over hospital efficiency.

Corinne Hollis’s domain.

I found my father, Dennis Whittaker, sitting in a plush armchair in the waiting area, doing a remarkable impression of a dying man.

His shoulders were slumped. He’d artfully mussed his hair. He was even holding his head in his hands.

When he saw me, he looked up, his eyes wide with a carefully rehearsed grief.

“Maren,” he rasped, rising unsteadily.

A nurse approached, her expression a mask of professional sympathy.

Corinne Hollis.

She was forty-two, her beauty sharpened by a predatory edge I’d been too naive to see before.

In my first life, I’d thought her kindness was a comfort.

Now, I saw the calculation in her eyes.

“Mr. Whittaker, your daughter is here,” she said, her voice smooth as silk.

“Thank you, Nurse Hollis,” he murmured, clinging to my arm.

“Dad, this clinic’s report… is it reliable?” I asked, my voice laced with a daughter’s earnest concern.

“Maybe we should get a second opinion. At a major hospital.”

The suggestion hung in the air like a live grenade.

Panic flickered in Dennis’s eyes for a fraction of a second before he masked it.

Corinne stepped in seamlessly.

“Our diagnostics are state-of-the-art, Maren. And Dr. Albright is one of the best. A second opinion would just be a waste of precious time.”

She placed a comforting hand on my father’s shoulder.

He snatched the falsified medical report from my grasp.

“No hospitals,” he said, his voice firm. “I trust them here.”

He steered me to a quieter corner.

“The doctor said… with aggressive treatment, there’s a chance,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “But the cost…”

Here it comes.

“Maren, I need you to help me. I need you to be my guarantor for a loan. For my treatment.”

He looked at me, his eyes pleading. The same look that had bankrupted me.

I met his gaze.

“No, Dad,” I said softly.

He blinked. “What?”

“We’re not treating it.”

The air crackled with his stunned silence.

“What did you just say?” he asked, his voice losing its frail act.

“I said, we’re not treating it,” I repeated, my tone gentle, reasonable. “Cancer treatment is agonizing. And there’s no guarantee it will work. You wouldn’t want to leave me with a mountain of debt for nothing, would you? That would be such a burden.”

The color rose in his cheeks. The dying man was vanishing, replaced by a furious, flustered tyrant.

“You ungrateful—!” he began, his voice rising.

Corinne shot him a warning look and glided over.

“Sweetheart,” she said to me, her voice dripping with condescension. “Your father raised you. He loves you. How can you be so heartless?”

I turned my head slowly to face her.

“You feel that strongly about it, Nurse Hollis?” I asked, a small, cold smile on my lips.

“Then by all means. You pay for it.”

§03

Corinne’s face tightened, her professional mask slipping to reveal a flash of raw fury.

“He’s your father, not mine,” she snapped.

“Exactly,” I replied, my voice dangerously sweet. “So why are you meddling in what doesn’t concern you?”

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