“Please don’t drink it because you always look so tired and sick after you finish the juice,” Daisy pleaded as tears began to roll down her cheeks. Miles stared at her with a stunned expression, his mind reeling not just from her warning, but from the fact that she had addressed him as her father.
“Why did you call me that, little girl?” Miles asked in a raspy voice as he looked between the crying child and the woman who was supposedly his savior. Daisy shook her head because she didn’t have a logical answer, but she instinctively rushed forward and knocked the glass out of his hand.
The juice splattered across the expensive rug and the glass shattered into a hundred jagged pieces as Bridget let out a scream of absolute fury. “I want this brat out of my house right this second!” Bridget yelled, but Miles was no longer listening to her frantic demands for order.
He looked at Daisy’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own features, recognizing an expression that felt like a bridge to a part of his life he thought he had lost. “Open the locked box in the kitchen, Bridget,” Miles commanded with a newfound strength in his voice that made the woman turn deathly pale.
Bridget tried to argue that he was being paranoid and that the child was clearly disturbed, but Miles pointed toward the kitchen and repeated his order. When the box was finally forced open, it revealed bottles of high-potency muscle relaxants and sedatives that were never prescribed by his actual doctor.
The decline of his health suddenly made perfect sense as he realized Bridget had been keeping him weak and confused so that she could maintain total control over his life. “Do you honestly think you would still have a place for me if you were able to walk away on your own?” Bridget hissed once she knew she was caught.
Silence filled the room as the weight of her betrayal sank in, revealing a motive rooted in a sick need for total dependence and the fear of being abandoned. A few days later, after the police had taken Bridget away, Elena finally sat down with Miles and confessed the truth about the little girl.
Daisy wasn’t actually her niece, but was the daughter of a woman Miles had dated briefly years ago before his career had taken him across the country. The mother had passed away recently, and Elena had taken the girl in, hoping to eventually find a way to introduce her to the father she had never met.