Chapter 4 - The Debt-4
"What do you mean, it wasn't just skin?" I whispered, my voice trembling so violently I could barely articulate the words.
Glen lowered his hands, revealing a face ruined by terror and tears. "The gambling debt, Maya... remember when I lost my job at the firm? It wasn't because of corporate downsizing. I was fired because I embezzled eighty thousand dollars to pay off a private bookkeeper in the city."
I felt the ground sway beneath my feet. I had spent two years believing my husband was a victim of corporate cruelty. I had worked double shifts as a high school teacher to cover our mortgage while he "looked for work."
"Eighty thousand?" I stammered. "You... you stole eighty thousand dollars?"
"And I lost that too!" Glen cried, his voice crackling with pathetic despair. "I owed a private lender named Marcus. He didn't care about payment plans or credit scores. He told me if I didn't have two hundred thousand dollars by the end of the month, he was going to take Ariel."
My heart stopped. A cold, metallic taste filled my mouth. "He threatened our daughter?"
"Yes!" Glen sobbed. "I was frantic! I went to everyone—my parents, my friends, banks—nobody would lend me that kind of money! And then... then Clara called me."
Every eye on the patio turned back to Clara. She stood near the lounge chair, her posture stiff, her face transformed into a mask of pure, icy hatred. She didn't look scared anymore; she looked furious that the truth was spilling out.
"Clara called you?" my father asked, his grip tightening on Glen's collar. "Why would Clara call you about a gambling debt?"
"She knew," Glen whimpered. "I don't know how, but she knew I was drowning in debt. She met me at a diner off the highway two weeks before my 'fishing trip.' She told me she would pay off Marcus entirely. She said she would hand over two hundred thousand dollars in cash..."
"In exchange for what?" I asked, though I wasn't sure I wanted to hear the answer.
Glen looked at my father, then looked at me, his eyes filled with profound shame. "She said she needed a biological match. She had a rare autoimmune condition that was destroying her internal organs—her kidney was failing, and her lower abdominal wall was necrotizing. She couldn't get on an official organ transplant list in the US because of her medical history..."
The pieces were coming together in a horrific, monstrous collage.
"She bought a kidney from you," my father said, his voice dropping an octave into a tone of pure horror. "She bought your kidney... and a skin flap to cover the surgical entry."
"She paid the clinic in Tijuana!" Glen wept. "She arranged the whole thing! The doctors took my left kidney and a five-inch flap of abdominal skin and tissue to rebuild her damaged wall! I didn't know she was going to take the part with the tattoo! I thought... I thought they were just taking plain skin! But the surgeon said the tissue match was best right around the old appendectomy site!"
A suffocating silence descended on the yard.
My stepmother hadn't just hated me for fifteen years. She hadn't just looked down on me as a rebellious teenager. She had looked at my husband—the man I loved, the father of my child—as a harvestable farm animal. A quick fix for her dying body, bought with illegal cash while leveraging a mobster's threat against my daughter.
I turned slowly to face Clara. She stood there, wrapped in her towel, holding her head high despite the grotesque horror of the truth.
"You bought my husband's organs," I said, my voice eerily calm, terrifyingly steady. "You coerced him using my daughter's life... and you had him carved up in a back-alley clinic in Mexico."
Clara sneered, her mask of high-society elegance completely slipping away, revealing the sociopath beneath.
"He was a desperate little worm, Maya," Clara said, her voice dripping with ice. "And frankly, I saved his pathetic life. If I hadn't bought that kidney, your little girl wouldn't have a father today anyway. Marcus would have put him in a ditch."
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Before anyone could move, my father released Glen’s collar. He turned, walked up to Clara, and did something I had never seen him do in my entire life.
He reached out, grabbed her designer leather handbag, turned it upside down, and dumped its entire contents into the swimming pool.
