The Dock
Chapter 01 - The Dock
The gangway creaked under Emily's crutches, sun bouncing hard off white hulls anchored behind her in the harbor.
Guests lined the dock in linen and pearls, waiting for the bride everyone had heard rumors about but few had actually seen since she came home wounded.
Emily stepped off the gangway slow, weight settling into the crutches instead of her bandaged leg. Blood had soaked through the gauze again, dark against white lace at her knee.
Her parents moved before she'd reached solid dock, Robert dropping to one knee on her left, Diane on her right, both suddenly urgent in a way Emily hadn't seen from either of them in eleven months.
"Sweetheart, let us help you, please," Robert said, gripping one crutch like a life raft. "Lean on us."
Emily stood perfectly still between them. Let the crutches take her weight.
"Where was this concern," she said, flat and carrying, "when I needed five thousand dollars for surgery?"
Diane's hand froze mid air, fingers curled toward Emily's sleeve and going nowhere.
The dock had gone quiet, guests realizing they were listening to something they weren't meant to hear.
"Emily," Diane said, voice cracking. "Please. Not here. Not today."
Emily looked past them both, out toward the anchored yachts.
"You bought Madison a yacht that week," she said, calm and cold. "I remember exactly what mattered more to you."
Nobody moved. The string quartet faltered, one violin dragging half a beat before catching up.
*They think this is about hurt feelings,* Emily thought. *They have no idea what I actually found in that account.*
She adjusted her grip on the crutches, medals catching sunlight, and looked toward the reception tent where her new husband was waiting.
"Excuse me," she said. "I have a wedding to get to."
May you like
She walked past them both, crutches clicking steady against the wooden planks, leaving her parents kneeling on an empty dock in front of a hundred guests who'd talk about this for a year.
What none of them knew yet, not even Emily fully, was that the five thousand dollars was the smallest number in a much longer story her parents had been hoping she'd never think to ask about.
