Each slide was a physical blow against everything they had tried to reduce her to, and each answer she gave was like another door slamming in Hunter’s smug face.
When the questions were finally over, the synod asked to deliberate in private, and Selena left the classroom with freezing hands.
Rebecca hugged her, a couple of students squeezed her fingers, and then her father approached until he was standing right in front of her.
“Hunter called me last night,” Carson said, his voice grave and low.
“He tried to convince me not to come today, and he told me that you were unstable and had completely lost your mind,” he added.
Selena felt the ground move beneath her feet, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
“And did you actually believe him?” she asked, bracing herself for the answer.
Carson swallowed hard, his eyes reflecting a deep, painful realization.
“No, and after that call, I discovered something that Hunter does not even imagine I know,” he said, glancing toward the closed door of the room.
The verdict had not yet been released, but what her father was about to say was going to change everything.
PART 3
Carson was not a man who was accustomed to apologizing, and he certainly wasn’t a man who was used to his voice shaking while talking to his own daughter.
But in front of Selena, in the quiet auditorium hallway, he had the broken look of a man who finally understood exactly how much he had missed during those three years of silence.
“I did not believe him because the call sounded entirely too rehearsed,” Carson continued.
“Hunter spoke as if he were trying to construct a narrative before I could hear your side of the story, and then his mother called me later, crying and saying you were out of control,” he explained.
