Chapter 3

In the month leading up to Christmas, I went through every emotion possible. Hurt, sadness, anger, grief. I texted my daughter and she texted back, but I could feel her heart wasn’t in it.

I spent the whole of December with an iron pit in my stomach, feeling a lump rise in my throat each time I thought of celebrating Christmas without my daughter.

I didn’t get a Christmas tree because I knew every time I saw the fir smugly sparkling at me I’d remember and feel bereft once more.

On Christmas Eve, I waited in vain for a call or a text from my daughter. I never got any. I called but my calls went straight to voicemail. I went to their house, but the guard at the gate told me that they had left on a trip. I went to the pub and necked beer like I was twenty again. I went back to my place tipsy, ready to wake up alone on Christmas day for the first time in my life.

Spending Christmas alone forced me to realize I had lost my daughter for good.

The only thing keeping me in town was Elise, and now she’d turned her back on me too. Maybe one day she’d change her mind. Or maybe she’d embrace harder her new way of life and she’d forget completely about me. One thing was sure, I was not going to die every day waiting for her call.

My sense of self was destroyed. I had been completely emasculated. I felt like I’d been taken out with the trash. After the Christmas fiasco, I didn’t bother to call or text my daughter anymore. She had my number if she wanted to reach me.

I needed a change of scenery and I needed it now! Things weren’t the same and I didn’t want to stay in town anymore.

Then, as a sign from Heaven, I got a call from the realtor saying the house had finally been sold. Since it was just my name on the deed and Ohio is not a community property state, I didn’t need the whore’s signature to sell it. She didn’t ask for anything in the divorce, except the 30% she took from our savings, so I didn’t feel the need to inform her about it.

As soon as I got the money from the house, I quit my job and cashed my 401k. Even after paying the penalty and taxes, I got a nice sum of money.

I sat down and calculated how much money I could leave my daughter to help her with her college. I didn’t care that doctor Dick was paying for it. She was still my daughter.

I made the check and paid a cheap lawyer to give it to my daughter only after she read the letter that I enclosed with it.