My Second Life Was for Revenge Against My Father

1: 1

The funeral rites for my mother had barely ended when my stepmother moved into my home, her daughter in tow.

In my last life I tore the house apart. I threw Selina Lawrence's luggage out the door and jabbed a finger in Mortimer Henson's face, calling him a heartless, faithless man.

Then he slapped me to the floor, drove me out that same night, and severed all ties between father and daughter.

I never even got the money for college.

So I dropped out and went to work in an electronics plant, where a machine on the line caught my right hand and took three fingers.

In the end I starved to death in a rented room in a rundown tenement district.

When I died I weighed under seventy pounds. On the nightstand sat a phone with a cracked screen, and the last message on it had been sent to Mortimer Henson.

Dad, lend me ten dollars for food. Please, I'm begging you.

The message showed as read. There was no reply.

At that very moment, he was throwing a wedding for Madge Fox. He'd handed over two million in dowry, and the officiant was reading out vows about a father's love being steady as a mountain.

Living it all again, I don't make a scene.

Because this time, I'm going to make every one of them pay.

..

So when Mortimer Henson came home with Selina Lawrence.

In front of everyone, I bowed to Selina, low and respectful.

Aunt Selina, I hope you'll look after us from now on.

Everyone froze.

A flicker of triumph crossed Selina's eyes, then she pasted on a smile and reached to help me up.

What a good girl. So mature about all this.

I straightened up with her hand, keeping my head lowered.

Dad's right. Mom's gone, and we still have to go on living. Aunt Selina took care of Dad for three years, so she's done this family a kindness. I'll be a good daughter to you from now on.

The lines smoothed from Mortimer Henson's forehead. He even looked moved.

If you can see it that way, then I can rest easy.

He thought I'd grown up. Grown sensible.

He didn't know I only wanted them to die a little more wretchedly.

That night, I brewed Selina a cup of tea.

Aunt Selina, this is white tea my mom left behind. It was her favorite when she was alive.

I held the cup out, my eyes rimmed red, my voice trembling.

I'd like you to have a cup. Think of it as my mom watching from above, entrusting this family to you.

Put that way, she had no choice but to drink it.

Selina took the cup, and the moment the tea touched her lips, I saw the look on her face.

She thought she'd won.

I kept my head down and hid the smile at the corner of my mouth.

I'd added a slow-acting endocrine disruptor to the tea. Colorless, tasteless. Taken over time, it causes irreversible damage to ovarian function.

Simply put, she could forget about ever carrying a child again in this life.

Selina was thirty-eight this year. Her biggest bargaining chip was her womb.

She was counting on giving Mortimer Henson a son to lock down her place as Mrs. Henson for good.

In my last life she did give birth, and Mortimer Henson was so pleased he signed over thirty percent of the company's shares to her and her son. I got nothing.

This time, her womb was just barren ground where nothing would ever sprout.

But making her infertile wasn't enough.

I wanted her to live out her days as a joke.

Later, lying in bed at midnight, I couldn't sleep a wink. After all, there was a good show waiting the next day.

2: 2

Sure enough, just as the sky was going pale, a scream tore through the house.

Madge Fox's face had broken out in a dense rash of red welts, the whole thing swollen up like a lump of raw meat, her eyes squeezed down to slits. It was horrifying and ridiculous all at once.

"Mom! My face! What's wrong with my face!"

She was shrieking around the room like she'd lost her mind.

Selina Lawrence dragged her off to the hospital in a panic.

The dermatologist called it severe allergic dermatitis with a secondary infection, cause unknown, and said she'd need at least a month of inpatient treatment.

Madge cried and refused to go out where anyone could see her, and Selina got so frantic that a ring of fever blisters broke out at the corners of her mouth.

Mortimer Henson frowned and turned to me.

"Brenda, did you have anything to do with this?"

I lifted my head, and the tears came instantly.

"Dad, you can doubt my character, but you can't wound me like this. I don't even know what brand of skincare Madge uses. If you think that of me, how can you face Mom's spirit in heaven?"

At the mention of my mother, Mortimer's expression softened at once.

"All right, all right, that's not what Dad meant."

He patted my shoulder.

"Stop crying. Your mother would ache to see it."

I buried my face against his shoulder and cried until my whole body shook.

Mortimer thought I was hurt.

He didn't know I was laughing.

Madge's face wasn't any allergy at all. I'd mixed industrial-grade sodium hydroxide into that jar of face cream she used.

The stuff burns skin, but at that concentration it wouldn't show up on any test. It would just look like stubborn dermatitis.

She loved being beautiful, didn't she?

She wanted to be the pampered young lady, didn't she?

I'd make her too afraid to even look in a mirror.

During the month Madge spent in the hospital, I didn't sit idle at home either.

Selina ran back and forth to the hospital every day, coming home worn out.

Each time, I was waiting at the door with warmed soup, sweet and obedient.

"You've had such a long day, Aunt Selina. I made you this herbal chicken soup, to build up your blood and energy."

There was no poison in the soup.

I didn't need to poison every bowl.

I only needed her to build the habit of drinking whatever I brought her.

A month later, Madge was discharged.

The swelling had mostly gone down, but it left patch after patch of dark red pigment behind, the kind no foundation could cover.

She stood in front of the mirror and cried the whole afternoon.

She clutched Selina's arm, nails sinking into the flesh.

"Mom, my face is ruined!"

"This is all your fault! You just had to move us to this dump! If I'd never come here, this never would have happened to me!"

Selina let her dig in until it hurt and didn't dare lose her temper.

I listened to the whole thing from the hallway, then pushed the door open with a bowl of sweet lily and berry pudding in my hands.

"Don't be upset, Madge. I know a dermatology specialist. I'll take you to see him one of these days."

I set the bowl on the table, gentle as a real older sister.

"Have some pudding first, soothe your throat. Crying too much is bad for your skin."

Madge glared at me with her red, swollen eyes and wanted to say something, but just then Mortimer passed by the doorway, and she forced it back down.

She didn't dare turn on me in front of my father.

Because she knew that no matter what happened, a real daughter would always have that one extra layer of blood a stepdaughter didn't.

And that was the very thing she hated most.

3: 3

In July, I got my college acceptance letter.

It had been my mother's dearest wish before she died. She never got to see it.

Mortimer was over the moon. He booked the largest private room at a five-star hotel and invited every relative and friend to celebrate.

Selina, of course, couldn't afford to slip in front of a crowd like that. Smiling, she handed me a jewelry box and opened it in front of everyone.

Inside lay a diamond necklace, glittering under the lights.

"Just a little something from your Aunt Selina."

She fastened it around my neck with her own hands, her voice sweet enough to make your teeth ache.

"Brenda is my own daughter now. Everything the Hensons have, she and Madge will split down the middle."

The relatives fell over themselves praising Selina's grace, and Mortimer nodded, well pleased.

I touched the necklace and thanked her, all smiles.

Once I got home, I took it off and studied it carefully under the light.

Crude cut, wrong refraction. Moissanite passing itself off as the real thing, worth two hundred dollars at most on the open market.

The genuine piece she'd claimed it was would run at least a hundred and sixty thousand.

I smiled.

Then I opened my laptop, logged in to a high-traffic jewelry appraisal forum, and posted under the name of a "concerned member of the public."

The title read: SHOCKING! The "diamond necklace" a certain company chairman's new wife gave her stepdaughter turns out to be FAKE? Nine high-res detail shots exposed!

The post carried nine close-ups of the necklace, marking out every telltale sign of a fake, from the cut facets and fire to the setting work.

Beside each one I set a comparison shot of the real thing, so anyone could see it at a glance.

I didn't name a soul. But I "accidentally" caught the Henson living room's feature wall in the last photo, the framed family portrait on it perfectly clear.

The comments blew up within the hour.

"Isn't that the living room in Mortimer Henson's house, from Henson Group? I've seen it on the news before!"

"I'm dying. The stepmother handed over a fake in front of that many people? What an act."

"A hundred-and-sixty-thousand necklace swapped for a two-hundred-dollar fake, so where'd the difference go? The more you think about it, the creepier it gets."

"If I were her dad I'd have thrown the woman out on the spot. So humiliating."

I smiled. This was only the beginning.

For the better part of a year, Selina had tried every trick in the book to get pregnant.

She bought ovulation strips by the pile, timed every cycle to the day, and tagged along even on Mortimer's business trips, terrified of missing a single chance.

But her belly stayed flat.

She panicked. She went for tests in secret, more than once, and the fertility center's results all said the same thing: severe ovarian failure, the odds of natural conception next to nothing.

She tore the reports up and threw them in the trash.

The next day I made her another bowl of chicken soup, and she drank every last drop.

And after all those months of that soup,

there was no chance left of her ever conceiving.

Mortimer watched his pretty young wife fail to catch, and he was pushing fifty. Drag it out any longer and he could forget about a son in this lifetime.

His patience was wearing thinner by the day.

One night, I heard them fighting in the bedroom.

"Is it that you can't have children?"

Mortimer's voice was loud, clear as anything through the door.

"The doctor said there's nothing wrong with me!" Selina sobbed out her defense. "Maybe... maybe it's because you're getting older"

She never finished. A loud, ringing slap.

"Say that again! Can I have kids or can't I?"

Selina clutched her face and cried harder, apologizing over and over, saying that wasn't what she meant.

Mortimer slammed the door and left.

I slipped into my room, locked the door, and laughed until my stomach hurt.

4: 4

On weekends, I chose to stay at the house.

One night, passing the study, I heard Selina inside, keeping her voice down on the phone.

"Next week... yeah, he's away on business. Come over that night." Her voice was low and hurried. "Don't drive that car of yours, it's too noticeable. Just this once. Do it and leave, understand?"

I stood outside the door and recorded the whole thing.

Then I slipped back to the end of the hall, as if I hadn't heard a thing.

The following Wednesday, Mortimer left on business, right on schedule.

Selina said she had a get-together with her girlfriends that night and told Madge and me to go out and enjoy ourselves.

I made plans with friends to check out a trendy new restaurant that had just opened.

Madge begged me to bring her along.

I happily agreed.

Then I had someone keep an eye on Madge, and I turned straight back to the villa.

At eleven that night, a gray Volkswagen pulled up at the villa's gate.

Selina got out and went inside together with the man in the driver's seat.

Neither of them turned on a light. They felt their way straight up to the second-floor guest room in the dark.

I followed behind them, my steps light as a cat's.

The moment the guest room door closed, I placed a video call to Mortimer.

"Dad, are you asleep?"

I kept my voice low, with a thread of nervousness in it.

On his end, Mortimer was still at a dinner, the background noisy.

"Not yet. Why are you still up so late?"

I spoke softly into the phone.

"I think someone's broken into the house."

"I heard noises coming from the guest room, really strange sounds... Dad, I'm a little scared."

Mortimer went tense all at once.

"Don't move. I'll send property security over!"

"It's fine, I'll just take a look. Maybe it's a stray cat."

I pointed the phone's camera at the guest room door and pushed it open.

On the screen, two bodies were tangled together.

Selina was on top of the man, her hair loose, her face lost in it.

And the man was none other than Nathan Lambert, the Henson family's private physician of ten years.

I let out a scream, and the phone "dropped" from my hand to the floor, but the camera landed facing up, at a perfect angle, the picture crystal clear.

On the other end, Mortimer was silent for a full five seconds.

Then came a roar I'd never heard from him before, like a beast.

I will never forget what that night looked like.

Mortimer tore back from out of town overnight, his face black as a pot bottom.

Selina knelt on the living room floor wrapped in a bedsheet, her knees bruised purple, her face a mess of tears and snot.

Nathan had bolted in the chaos, and Mortimer didn't chase him, probably deciding that dragging him back would only be more humiliating.

Selina clung to Mortimer's leg, her face pressed against his leather shoe.

"Mortimer, listen to me! He seduced me!"

"It was a moment of weakness! Give me one more chance!"

"A moment of weakness?" Mortimer kicked her off. "The way you were riding him just now didn't look like weakness to me!"

I huddled in the corner of the sofa with my face buried in my hands, my shoulders shaking, pretending to cry.

"Dad..." I said, my voice catching. "Don't be angry, your health comes first. You still have me. Aren't I your daughter?"

The words were like a needle straight into Selina's heart.

Her head snapped up and she glared at me, her eyes bloodshot, her voice shrill as a nail scraping a blackboard.

"It's you! You set this up to ruin me!"

I cried harder.

"Aunt Selina, what are you talking about? I don't know anything... I just heard the noises and got scared, so I called Dad..."