Read Justifiable for Free Online Page A

voice mails. None that stated what you specifically wanted.” 
    “I want to know how you’re doing.”
    Hadn’t taken long for his first lie to surface.
    “I’m fine. Anything else?”  Kirsten clutched her trench coat close and wove her way around slower-moving pedestrians while brittle silence answered her. Don’t like it that you can’t bully me?
    “Your mother would want us to be together, to support each other.”
    No, she wouldn’t. Kirsten worked around the pain lodged in her throat. Her mother had rarely uttered her own opinion about anything when Kirsten lived at home, always parroting whatever her father said. The last time Kirsten had seen her mother at the family home in Chicago, her mother had cautioned her not to provoke her father.
    Kirsten had replied sarcastically, “I’m twenty six. What’s he going to do? Ground me?”
    Her mother’s voice had carried a chill of warning when she said, “You have no idea what your father is capable of.”
    Years of watching her petite mother live in the shadow of her father as nothing more than a doormat trophy wife had blown the lid off Kirsten’s patience. She’d stopped packing her clothes that last day at home and said, “You’re still very attractive. Divorce him and find someone who appreciates you. You deserve to be loved.”
    Hope had flared in her mother’s eyes before she looked away. “I can’t.”
    “Sure you can. I’m taking my bar exam in a week. I’ll represent you myself and – ”
    “No.”
    “Why are you so afraid of him?” Kirsten had finally asked.
    Her mother just shook her head. “I made my bed and can’t walk away from it. Just don’t cross him. He wants you here in Chicago and working with his company. Give him what he wants and you won’t have any problems.”
    Kirsten had heard that all her life. Do what your father asks. Mind your father. Your father is right.
    “I am not you, Mom. I will not live under his thumb like a helpless bug,” Kirsten had said in a snarling tone she regretted two weeks later as she’d watched her mother’s casket lowered into the ground.
    Four days before the unexpected funeral, Kirsten had received a cryptic voice mail from her mother saying, “I’m sending a friend to you who needs help.”
    After two hours of trying to locate her mother by phone, Kirsten had finally dropped what she was doing and driven to Chicago. By the time she’d arrived, her mother was in the hospital in ICU after having suffered a major stroke from which she died six hours later.
    The doctors had no idea what caused the seizure in a forty-eight-year-old woman who was an avid tennis player in optimum physical condition.
    Kirsten wanted an autopsy.
    Her father refused to have his wife’s body desecrated, but he’d had no problem cremating her.
    “Kirsten, I miss you,” her father’s voice said from the Bluetooth, yanking her back to the present. “Come home for a visit.” 
    She inhaled a quick breath of icy air that froze her lungs. “I’ve got a heavy caseload and little time off.”
    “You don’t take time off.”
    “What do want from me, Dad?”
    “I feel like I’ve lost my whole family. I need to see you.”
    She struggled against all the things she wanted to scream at him. The audacity of his acting as though he’d lost a loved one. She’d lost her mother, because of him. “We never were a touchy-feely family. I do better working all the time. Like you.”
    He allowed the quiet to fill in for a few seconds, something he liked to do to put his opponents on edge. Didn’t work on her. She waited him out until he finally spoke again.
    “The new marker is finished. I thought it would be nice for us to be together the day they set it in place.”
    No, it would be nice to have her mother back. Kirsten couldn’t care less about the elaborate statue he’d probably had carved in honor of his wife. She’d bet the media would be involved as well, but refusing him would only raise his