Courageous Love - Jerry Cole Page 0,37
whether the town fought or went along quietly. But he couldn’t control everyone like he thought.
In the corner of my eye I saw what I had been waiting for. Stacy nodded to me, giving me a thumbs up. We were done stalling; the final phase was here.
I yelled as loudly as I could, “You don’t even own this land at all!”
The crowd hushed and my dad’s eyes found me even in the thick of all those people.
“What makes you say that?” His act of friendly CEO was falling. I heard so much venom in his words it could have killed me. But I refused to let him get to me.
“I said it. And I have proof.”
Stacy handed me the document and I walked toward him, the crowd parting for me. On the way I saw Cecil and took his hand, leading him to the front with me.
“Dad, I want you to meet my boyfriend Cecil.”
Cecil waved slightly, which had to have pissed my dad off.
“He runs the graveyard in town. His family, the Domires, have owned it for generations and generations.”
“I know how slow you are,” he made sure to say after covering the microphone. “But your grandparents gifted me the land. I don’t own or care about the graveyard.”
“That stings father.” I put a hand over my heart. “Not just the insult but that fact that you seem to know nothing about your parents and who their friends were.
“What?” In his anger he lifted his hand off the microphone so I made sure to speak clearly.
“My grandparents were best friends with the Domires. I had no idea until I noticed their peculiar taste in architecture. Both families have glass rooms in their houses facing each other. And it’s not like that’s a popular style in town. I asked everyone just to make sure. They are unique. Both rooms happened to face each other too and give a great view between them. In a small town like this, whenever your parents stayed, they didn’t have things like phone operators or anything. So, how best to let your best friends know you are in town? Why, you would shine a light in your glass room to theirs of course.”
“That’s a story. A creative story, but fiction nonetheless,” my father scoffed.
“I thought it might be farfetched, Dad.” I grinned. “But I remembered how much that room meant to them. They have an exact copy in our own mansion, don’t they?”
“What does this have to do with the land?” My father was boiling mad.
“I wanted to test my theory that they were as close friends as I thought. So we did some digging. A few late nights going through every document in town. And you know what we found?”
I held the paper up for him to read. “They gifted all the land they bought to the Domires in case they wanted to expand their graveyard. Of course, instead the town expanded, but I’ll leave that up to their descendants to decide what he wants to do with that.”
“This is insane. And untrue,” my dad seethed. He tried to tear the paper from me but I quickly stepped back having assumed he would try something like that. “It was in their will that the land belonged to me.”
“Actually Dad.” I pulled out my phone. “I asked my dear siblings for a copy of the will; they had no idea what for but they did it anyway.” My one gift to them for helping me would be making it seem like they weren’t involved. We were officially even. “The wording says all land they owned was given to you. It’s not my fault you didn’t check to see this particular land had already been gifted away.”
“Do you have anything to say about this Mr. Westcott?”
Cecil and I backed up as a crew of people with cameras and microphones surrounded my father. I was confused until I looked back at Stacy who was nodding like she knew. I guess she had disappeared that day for a reason after all. She really knew how to weaponize the media. My dad wasn’t used to her using it against him.
“I can’t believe you guessed all that just from seeing those two rooms,” Cecil said as we walked away from the PR disaster my dad was going through.
“It wasn’t just that,” I admitted. “You were right about the view being strange. Why have a room full of windows pointed at a graveyard? And their dining room table; it’s so large