Access Denied: A Daughter’s Reckoning
The gravel crunched under my tires as I pulled into the driveway after a brutal ten-hour workday. My eyes were burning from staring at screens, my back ached from sitting in the same position too long, and all I wanted was a hot shower and maybe some leftover pizza. Instead, what I found waiting for me would shatter everything I thought I knew about family, loyalty, and the limits of human deceit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning—or rather, at the moment everything ended.
The Garden
It was a Tuesday in late spring when my world tilted on its axis. The Texas hill country was in full bloom, wildflowers painting the roadsides in brilliant purples and golds. I remember thinking how beautiful it all looked as I drove home, how lucky I was to live in such a stunning place.
That thought died the moment I saw my driveway.
Where Aunt Alice’s rose garden should have been—two hundred square feet of carefully cultivated heritage roses that had taken her thirty years to perfect—there was nothing. Just flat, brown dirt. Smooth as a putting green. Industrial rolls of artificial turf sat stacked at the edge like oversized carpet samples, and a small bulldozer squatted nearby, its bucket still caked with soil and what looked like shredded roots.
I sat in my car, hands frozen on the steering wheel, unable to process what I was seeing. The garden had been there this morning. I had walked past it on my way out, admiring the early blooms on the Madame Isaac Pereire. Now there was just… emptiness.
My chest tightened. I couldn’t breathe. The air felt too thick, too heavy.
I stumbled out of the car, leaving my laptop bag on the passenger seat, and walked toward the destruction on legs that didn’t feel attached to my body. The scent was all wrong—diesel fumes and torn earth instead of the delicate rose perfume that usually drifted through the yard on spring evenings.
“Oh, you’re home early.”
My father’s voice cut through my shock like a blade.
“What do you think? Pretty impressive, right?”
Arthur Bennett stood near the artificial turf rolls with his hands on his hips, wearing that self-satisfied expression he always adopted when he thought he’d done something clever. At sixty-two, he still had the build of a former high school football player gone soft—broad shoulders, thick around the middle, silver hair meticulously groomed. He wore khakis and a polo shirt like he was about to tee off at a country club instead of standing in the ruins of something irreplaceable.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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