Chapter 2 - The Silent Phone Screen
The phone that had slipped against the laminate table belonged to my cousin Jake. The screen glowed with an automated text alert from the city's family welfare registry, but nobody was looking at the phone anymore.
Michael lunged forward, grabbing my wrist before the dirt bag could touch his mother. His fingers clamped down hard enough to bruise. "Have you lost your absolute mind, Emily?" he roared, shaking my arm. "Look at what you just tried to do to an elderly woman!"
"She brought trash to our five-year-old son's birthday party and called it a lesson!" I screamed back, wrenching my arm free. "And you stood there defending her! Look at Matthew!"
Matthew was curled into a ball on the living room rug, his small shoulders shaking as my mother knelt beside him, stroking his hair and crying softly. My father stood between Sarah and me, his chest heaving. He looked at Michael with pure disgust. "You call yourself a father? Your mother terrorizes your child, and you protect her?"
Sarah brushed invisible dust off her beige coat, her face twisted in a mask of righteous martyrdom. "This is precisely what I mean, Michael. Hysteria. Violence. It's in the bloodline. If you don't take full custody of that boy right now, he will grow up ruined."
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Michael froze. His eyes darted from Sarah to me, then to Matthew. "What... what did you say?"
Sarah pulled a folded document from her leather handbag and tossed it onto the half-eaten birthday cake. "Emergency guardianship papers. Filed this morning. Once the court sees the environment he's living in—and your wife's violent assault—you'll have sole custody within the week."
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