Chapter 4 - The War Of Words**
The story broke at six a.m. three days later.
**EXCLUSIVE: CHIEF JUSTICE’S DAUGHTER HID IDENTITY TO TRAP LAWYER HUSBAND, SOURCE CLAIMS**, read the headline on Channel 7’s website. Below it, a three-minute interview with David, looking tired but sincere, his shirt collar open, his eyes red, sitting in the motel room with the blinds drawn.
“I loved her,” David told the camera, his voice cracking perfectly on cue. “I loved her more than anything. I married her thinking she was a sweet, quiet girl who had nobody. I wanted to take care of her. I had no idea she was the daughter of the most powerful man in the state. She lied to me. For three years, she lied. And when she decided she was bored of me? She faked the whole thing. She threw herself against that counter. She hurt herself and our baby just so she could have an excuse to call her daddy and ruin me. It was all a trap. And I walked right into it.”
Sylvia was in the segment too, dabbing at her eyes with a crumpled tissue, playing the grieving grandmother to perfection. “That poor baby,” she wailed. “My grandson. She killed him just to get back at us. She’s a monster. A cold, calculating monster. And her father is letting her get away with it because he thinks he’s above the law!”
By noon, the story was everywhere. Facebook. Twitter. The local paper. The national news. Comments sections exploded. People were furious.
*This is exactly why I hate rich people! They can do whatever they want!*
*She hid who she was for three years? That’s insane! Who does that?*
*Poor guy! He thought he was marrying a nice girl and got a gold digger with a Supreme Court daddy!*
*The Chief Justice should resign! Using his power to destroy regular people! Disgraceful!*
It worked.
It worked better than David could have ever dreamed. The narrative flipped overnight. Suddenly, Anna and my father were the villains. David and Sylvia were the poor, innocent victims of a wealthy, powerful family that had decided to crush them for sport. Pundits argued about it on TV. Radio hosts screamed about it. My father’s approval rating, which had been sky-high for a decade, dropped ten points in forty-eight hours.
My father’s chief of staff came to the hospital room that afternoon, her face tight with worry, carrying a tablet full of headlines and poll numbers. “It’s bad,” she said, laying the tablet on the table. “Really bad. Hale is a lawyer. He knows exactly how to frame this. He’s making it about class, about power, about a regular guy getting steamrolled by the establishment. And people are eating it up. The trial is going to be a circus. Every camera in the country is going to be in that courtroom. If we don’t get ahead of this—”
“We don’t get ahead of anything,” my father said calmly. He was sitting by the window, watching the snow fall outside. He hadn’t changed his expression once through the whole briefing. “We don’t do press releases. We don’t do interviews. We don’t argue with him in the media. That is exactly what he wants. He wants to drag us down into the mud with him. He wants to make this a he-said-she-said popularity contest.”
He turned and looked at me. I was sitting up in bed, reading the comments on my phone, my face burning. Part of me wanted to scream. To call every news station in the country and tell them the truth. To show them the pictures of my bruises. To make them understand. But another part of me—the part that was my father’s daughter—knew he was right.
“David is a performer,” my father continued. “He is good at sounding sincere when he is lying. He has spent his whole career convincing juries of things that aren’t true. If we fight him on his turf—on TV, on social media, with soundbites—he might win. But there is one place he cannot win.” He tapped his finger on the stack of legal files beside him. “In a court of law. Under oath. With evidence. With cross-examination. That is my turf. And that is where we will destroy him.”
He looked at his chief of staff. “Tell the press exactly twelve words: ‘We will let the evidence speak for itself in a court of law.’ Nothing else. No comments. No reactions. Not one single word. Let him keep talking. The more he says now, the more rope he gives us to hang him with later.”
She nodded and hurried out.
I threw my phone onto the bed. “It’s so unfair,” I said, my voice shaking. “They’re lying. They’re lying and everyone believes them. Everyone thinks I’m a monster.”
My father stood up and came over to the bed. He sat down beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “Let them,” he said softly. “Let them believe whatever they want to believe right now. Let David have his fifteen minutes of fame on the evening news. Let him feel like he’s winning. Because the higher he climbs right now, the harder he is going to fall when the truth comes out.”
He gestured to the door. “You know who came to see me this morning? The sheriff. The one David was bragging about playing golf with. He brought me something. David’s old phone. The one he used the night of Christmas. The forensics team got into it. And do you know what they found?”
I shook my head.
“Text messages,” my father said. His voice went cold. “Hundreds of them. Going back two years. Between David and his mother. Planning. Discussing. ‘Make her do all the cooking tonight, she needs to learn her place.’ ‘Don’t let her use the good china, she’s not good enough for it.’ ‘Tell her if she doesn’t stop complaining, we’ll throw her out on the street.’ And the best one? Sent at 6:48 p.m. on Christmas night. From David to Sylvia: ‘She’s getting annoying. If she keeps it up, push her a little. Remind her who runs this house.’*”
My breath caught.
“He wrote it,” my father said. “He admitted it. In black and white. He told his mother to push you. And that is just the beginning. We have the medical records proving the injuries were consistent with being thrown, not falling. We have the witness statements, all consistent, all matching. We have the security footage from the neighbor’s camera that shows David dragging you across the kitchen floor while you screamed for help. We have everything, Anna. Every single piece of the puzzle. David thinks he’s winning because he’s good at telling lies to cameras. But lies don’t stand up to evidence. And we have enough evidence to bury him under the jail.”
He squeezed my shoulder. “So let him talk. Let him get comfortable in the spotlight. Let the whole country hate us for a few weeks. Because when that trial starts? We are not just going to prove he is guilty. We are going to prove he is a liar. A coward. And a man who helped kill his own child. And when we are done? The whole world is going to know exactly who the real monster is.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder. For the first time since the story broke, I breathed.
He was right.
David was having his fun now. But the trial was coming.
May you like
And I was going to make sure every single word he had ever said came back to eat him alive.
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