Chapter 6 - The Midnight Eviction
The drive to my parents' house was suffocating.
Detective Ramirez had offered to escort me home in her unmarked squad car to ensure I could retrieve my personal belongings safely. A private security van from Thorne Industries followed closely behind us, arranged by Dr. Thorne to transport my tools, computer rigs, and spare robotics parts.
It was nearly eleven at night when the squad car turned onto our quiet suburban street in Lakewood.
The neighborhood was pitch black, except for the harsh floodlights illuminating the front yard of my family’s two-story house.
And there, strewn across the damp, manicured lawn, was my entire life.
Plastic storage tubs were overturned. My clothes—jeans, sweaters, high school track shirts—were scattered across the grass, soaked with evening dew. Cardboard boxes containing my engineering textbooks had been ripped open and kicked down the driveway.
Standing on the front porch with his arms crossed was my father.
Beside him, clutching a damp tissue to her face, stood my mother.
Mom hadn't come to the competition today. She had stayed home to bake celebratory brownies for Ryan's hockey game. Now, her face was swollen from crying, her shoulders shaking with hysterical sobs.
When Detective Ramirez and I stepped out of the cruiser, Dad marched down the porch steps, his heavy finger pointed straight at my chest.
“Keep that officer right where she is!” Dad bellowed, his voice carrying down the quiet street, waking up neighbors whose bedroom lights began flicking on one by one. “You have no right to step foot on my property, Emily! You’re an ungrateful, vindictive little snake!”
“Mr. Vance,” Detective Ramirez said, stepping smoothly between Dad and me, her hand resting calmly near her utility belt. “Lower your voice. Miss Vance is a minor until next month, and she is legally entitled to retrieve her essential personal effects without harassment.”
“Her effects?” Dad laughed, a bitter, vicious sound. “Look around! Her effects are on the grass! Take them and get the hell out of my sight!”
Mom stumbled down the porch steps, clutching Dad’s arm. “Emily… how could you do this to your brother?” she wailed, her voice thick with blame. “He’s in a holding cell downtown! They won't set bail until Monday! He’s cold, he’s terrified, and you’re standing there with the police like you’re proud of yourself!”
“Mom,” I said, feeling a dull ache in my chest. “Ryan took a bribe to commit corporate espionage. He stole from Thorne Industries, and then he stomped ARIA to pieces right in front of me.”
“He was confused!” Mom screamed, her voice cracking. “Julian Sterling pressured him! Ryan is a boy, Emily! He doesn't know about business! You should have protected him! You should have deleted that horrible video!”
“He’s nineteen years old, Mom,” I said, looking at her with cold pity. “He’s a legal adult. And you’ve been cleaning up his messes his entire life. When he crashed the family car two years ago, you told the insurance company you were driving. When he failed his high school midterms, you harassed the principal until they changed his grade. Look where that got him.”
“Shut your mouth!” Dad roared, lunging forward.
Detective Ramirez’s hand snapped onto her taser holster. “Step back, sir! Final warning!”
Dad froze, his chest heaving, his fists clutched so tightly his knuckles were white. “You think you’re smart, Emily? You think you won today? Richard Sterling has the best criminal defense attorneys in the state. They’ll have Ryan out of that precinct before breakfast. And when he walks, you’ll have nothing. No family. No home. No money.”
I didn't answer him.
I walked over to the lawn, picking up my favorite green jacket and shaking the damp dirt from its sleeves. Two Thorne Industries security guards stepped out of their van, carrying heavy-duty plastic totes. Without saying a word, they began carefully packing my textbooks, my soldering station, and my clothing into the back of the transport.
I walked toward the garage.
“Don't you touch that garage!” Dad barked.
“My workstation is inside,” I said, walking right past him. “Everything in that garage was purchased with money from my paychecks at the diner. I have every single receipt saved on a digital cloud.”
The garage door was half-open. Inside, my workbench had already been vandalized. Dad had taken a crowbar to my spare monitors. The screens were shattered, jagged black lines spidering across the LCD glass. My component drawers had been dumped out onto the grease-stained concrete—thousands of tiny resistors, capacitors, and microchips scattered like gravel.
He had tried to destroy everything.
He had wanted to make sure I had nothing left to build with.
I stood in the center of the ruined workspace. But instead of crying, I felt an icy resolve settle into my bones.
He could break my monitors. He could smash my plastic drawers. He could throw my clothes onto the wet grass.
But he couldn't break what was inside my head.
I walked over to the locked steel cabinet in the corner of the garage—the one cabinet he couldn't open because it used a custom biometric fingerprint scanner I had wired myself.
I placed my thumb against the glass sensor.
The solenoid clicked open.
Inside, pristine and untouched, lay the original CAD schematics for ARIA’s chassis, three custom-wound brushless servomotors I had spent six months machining, and a black waterproof hard case containing my primary code repository.
I picked up the case.
As I walked out of the garage, Mom looked at me through her tears. “Emily… please. If you tell the police you dropped the robot yourself… if you say the audio was edited… Ryan can come home.”
I looked at the woman who had given birth to me, who had watched me stay awake until four in the morning studying while Ryan partied on Dad’s dime, and who had never once asked if I was tired.
“Goodbye, Mom,” I said.
May you like
I climbed into the passenger seat of the Thorne Industries security van, slammed the heavy door shut, and didn't look back as we pulled away into the night.
***
