It’s past midnight, and the building is quiet except for the sound of someone’s television bleeding through thin walls.
I’ve been calling him for five days straight, getting nothing but voicemail, and the worried knot in my stomach has finally overridden my respect for his privacy.
I’ve been documenting his gambling behavior for weeks, writing down the times he disappeared, the phone calls that made him flinch, the way he’d started avoiding eye contact when we talked about money.
I was building a case for an intervention, gathering evidence that his addiction was spiraling out of control. But five days of silence feels different.
It feels ominous.
The apartment door is unlocked, which should have been my first clue that something is seriously wrong.
Dad is paranoid about security and has been ever since Mom died and he started attracting the attention of less savory creditors. He never leaves his door unlocked.
Inside, the apartment looks like a tornado tore through it.
The couch is overturned, cushions are scattered across the hardwood floor.
Family photos lay in broken frames, glass crunching under my feet.
Papers are everywhere—bills, bank statements, what looked like betting slips—scattered like confetti.
“Dad?” My voice comes out as a whisper, my heart in my throat as I cautiously move through the apartment. “Dad, are you here?”
I follow a trail of dark droplets across the floor, my heart hammering against my ribs as I realize they’re blood.
They lead from the front door to the bathroom, where I can hear water running and someone crying.
The bathroom door is ajar, and through the gap I see Dad hunched over the sink, still wearing a shirt that was soaked red from collar to hem.
His hands shake as he tries to wash blood from his face, but more keeps flowing from a cut on his forehead that needs stitches.
“Oh my god, Dad!” I push the door open and rush to him, taking in the full extent of the damage.
His left eye is swollen shut, his lip split, bruises blooming across his cheek in purple and yellow. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
He looks at me in the mirror, and the expression on his face is pure terror.
Not just fear.
This is a look of bone-deep knowledge that he’s in more trouble than he knows how to handle.
“Gigi.” His voice is thick through his injured lips. “You shouldn’t be here. They might come back.”
“Whomight come back?” I’m shaking like a leaf. “Dad, talk to me. What’s going on?”
He breaks then, crumbling against the bathroom counter as years of accumulated guilt and fear finally overwhelm him.
The story comes out in broken sobs and fractured sentences, and with each detail, my world feels like it’s turning sideways.
The gambling debts are worse than I’d imagined.
Much,muchworse.
He owes money to people who don’t accept payment plans or negotiate terms.
They’d approached him two weeks earlier with a proposition: fifty thousand dollars to clear his debts completely.
All they wanted in exchange was information about some businessman’s schedule.
