Chapter 2 - The Sound of the Screen
The sun dipped below the horizon, painting the Cedar Rapids sky in bruised shades of purple and charcoal. Inside the house, the atmosphere was thick with a heavy, suffocating grief. Rachel had finally gone upstairs to wash the cake frosting and mud from her hands, leaving me alone in the dimly lit kitchen.
On the dining table sat Tessa’s brand-new smartphone—the prize Howard had handed her the second the dirt hit the frosting.
Tessa had left it sitting on the counter near the fruit bowl before running off to her friend's house to show off her new toy. The screen was dark, locked with a standard factory passcode. But notifications were already beginning to cascade across the OLED display, lighting up the kitchen with silent, rhythmic flashes.
Ping. Ping. Ping.
I walked over, my footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor. I picked up the phone.
Even locked, preview windows were flashing across the top of the display. Most of them were automated setup prompts, cloud backup confirmations, and Instagram download notifications. But then, a text message preview popped up from a contact saved simply as “Grandpa Howard.”
My thumb hovered over the glass. I didn't need to unlock the device to read the preview lines, but curiosity—and a deep, burning instinct for self-preservation—pushed me to look closer. Howard had always treated personal communication like classified state secrets; seeing him text an eleven-year-old about operational logistics felt out of character, even for him.
I pressed the screen. A face-recognition prompt flickered, failed because it wasn't Tessa’s face, and then requested the PIN.
I didn't know the PIN. But I knew my father. Howard was a creature of rigid, unimaginative habits. Every digital security code, gate combination, and bank PIN he had used for the last thirty years incorporated his birth month and year: 0452.
I tapped four digits into the keypad.
Click.
The home screen unlocked instantly.
The background wallpaper was a grinning selfie of Howard and Tessa at a country club brunch. But my eyes went straight to the messaging app. I opened the thread between Tessa and Howard, scrolling up past the innocent emojis and sticker animations into the territory of things an eleven-year-old should never be exposed to by her grandfather.
My breath caught in my throat.
The messages went back six months. They weren't just about phones or birthday cakes. They were a systematic blueprint of manipulation.
“Don't worry about what your uncle Julian says,” one message from Howard dated three months ago read. “He’s weak. He spends too much money on that boy of his. If you want the new skating dress, you just have to remind your father to do what I tell him with the property titles.”
Another message, sent just last week, made my blood run cold: “Make sure you drop the dirt right on the top tier. Your uncle thinks he’s so smart with his tech company money. We need to remind them who really runs this family.”
And then, a message time-stamped twenty minutes before the party started today: “Phone is in my glove box. Deliver the soil as planned. If Julian gets angry, let him yell. Your dad and I have a surprise coming for him tomorrow morning that will wipe that smug look right off his face.”
A surprise tomorrow morning.
I stared at the glowing screen, the words burning into my retinas. Howard wasn't just indulging in casual cruelty or random petty vandalism. He was executing a calculated campaign to destabilize my household, undermine my authority as a father, and—based on that last text—launching some kind of financial or legal ambush against me at dawn.
My thumb scrolled further up the chat logs, unearthing deeper layers of deception. I found forwarded documents, screenshots of property deeds belonging to our late grandmother’s estate—deeds that Howard had supposedly divided equally among his three children years ago. Except, according to a draft legal petition attached to a message from Brian to Howard, they had secretly modified the filings to squeeze my name entirely off the ancestral farmland title, diverting the inheritance directly into a trust controlled by Howard and Brian.
They weren't just playing games with a birthday cake. They were stealing my family's legacy behind my back, using an eleven-year-old child as a digital courier and a pawn in their financial chess match.
Right at that moment, the front door clicked open.
“Dad? Uncle Julian?” a light, adolescent voice called out from the hallway. “I forgot my charger on the counter. Mom sent me back for it.”
May you like
Tessa’s footsteps skipped across the foyer.
I stood motionless beside the kitchen island, the glowing phone resting in my palm, the dark shadows of the kitchen concealing my face as the footsteps drew closer to the doorway.
