Then she smiled. “You can’t take it back anyway. He has paperwork.”
I should have exploded.
Instead, I opened the drawer where I kept the title and quietly smiled—because she had just made a mistake far bigger than stealing my car.
The first thing I noticed when I got home was the empty driveway.
The second was Madison sitting at my kitchen island, smiling as she said, “Dad needed it more than you did.”
For three seconds, I thought she was joking.
My black GMC Yukon had been beside the garage when I left for a three-day business conference. I’d bought it eighteen months earlier with my own money. The title, registration, insurance, and loan payoff documents were all in my name.
Yet Madison had somehow given it to her biological father, Derek.
“You gave Derek my SUV?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be dramatic, Ethan. He doesn’t have a reliable car.”
My wife, Laura, entered with groceries and immediately avoided my eyes.
That told me enough.
“You knew?”
Laura sighed. “Madison asked me. I told her maybe you’d understand.”
“Maybe?”
“She’s twenty-two,” Laura snapped. “She wanted to help her father.”
I stared at them.
Apparently, generosity was easy when the gift was someone else’s forty-eight-thousand-dollar vehicle.
Madison crossed her arms.
“Besides, Derek said you barely need it. You have the company sedan.”
I almost laughed.
Derek had hated me since Laura married me eight years earlier. He called me “Mr. Spreadsheet” because I worked in corporate risk management. At family gatherings, he loved reminding everyone that he had been Laura’s “first real man.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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