“You were angry that I wasn’t running fast enough with the soccer ball you bought me.”
“You pushed me off the timber deck into the rocky ravine.”
The entire dining room drew in a collective, horrified, paralyzed breath.
Richard’s face did not merely pale; his capillaries collapsed inward, leaving his skin the exact, mottled shade of sour skim milk:
“No…”
Richard stammered, his hands clawing at his dinner jacket: “That… that was an accident!
You tripped on the root!
The police report confirmed an accidental tumble!”
“The police report was signed by your college fraternity brother, County Sheriff Clint Vance,” Julian revealed, every word dropping like an eighty-pound iron anvil into thirty fathoms of sub-zero lake water:
“You cracked my thoracic vertebrae.”
“You severed the lower lumbar sensory pathways.”
“And when the surgeons in Ann Arbor told you that I would never sprint on a football field, you couldn’t bear the public shame of having a crippled son who was the victim of your own domestic rage.”
