Free The Ex Files by Victoria Christopher Murray Page A

kind of issue. She had, after all, risen high from the streets of Compton.

Chapter Thirteen
    K ENDALL
    “Hi, Daddy. What time do you want me to pick you up?” Kendall asked as she did every Tuesday. The weekly dinner with her father was the only ritual outside of work that she kept.
    “Baby girl, I’m not really up for going out tonight. Let’s eat in. I need to talk to you.”
    Kendall frowned. It had been a while since her father had used this tactic. She waited a moment, hoping he’d have a change of mind. “Daddy, you know I can’t.”
    “You can’t or you won’t. Either way, it’s crazy. This is my home, Kendall. You telling me that you can’t come to your father’s home?”
    Kendall sighed. A couple of months had passed since her father had one of these rampages. “Daddy, if you’re not feeling well, we’ll just do this next week.”
    “So it’s like that, huh? You’re going to leave me here in this house. Alone. And sick. And tired. And hungry.”
    “You haven’t eaten?”
    “Do you care?”
    “Daddy…”
    “Baby girl,” he said, his voice softening, “your sister won’t be here if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    She didn’t believe him.
    “You can trust me,” he added, knowing his daughter’s thoughts. “I had a long talk with Sabrina earlier today. She knows you’re coming over here; she won’t come by.”
    Kendall frowned. Why had her father told Sabrina that she’d be there tonight when they always went out on Tuesdays?
    It still took several minutes for her to agree and within an hour, Kendall exited the freeway and then made a quick right onto the block where she had spent her formative years. She slowed her Jeep, peering at every parked car even though she didn’t know what she was looking for. She hadn’t seen Sabrina in more than a year; she had no idea if her sister still drove the Jeep that they’d purchased on the same day and matched the one she was driving.
    When she turned off the ignition, she could feel the heat of the Chinese food she’d bought, seeping through the bags onto her lap. But still, she stayed, studying the place that she had long ago stopped calling home.
    Few people knew that she’d grown up in Compton. It wasn’t that her years here were unhappy. It was just that she believed in progress. Both she and Sabrina had pulled “The Jeffersons”—they had moved on out and up. A few years ago, they’d tried to do the same for their father, putting a down payment on a condo in Marina del Rey as a surprise for Father’s Day. But he’d balked at the thought of leaving the home he’d purchased with his wife almost forty years before.
    “I can still feel your mother here; I’m not going anywhere,” he’d said. “You’d better get your money back!”
    That’s just what they’d done, settling for taking their father out to dinner instead of gifting him with a new home.
    The thought of better days with her sister almost made Kendall smile. She would have, if she hadn’t needed the effort to push back tears that tried to come to her eyes. It surprised her, the way she still wanted to cry for Sabrina…and Anthony.
    She’d never been able to figure out who’d hurt her most. She’d loved Anthony with every beat of her heart, so sure that not until death would they part.
    But Sabrina’s betrayal sucked the blood straight from her. Her own sister. Some people called Sabrina her half sister; together, for sure, they’d made a whole. Even if their beginnings, over thirty years ago, had been as scandalous as their end.
    Kendall still remembered the whispers, her mother’s tears, the slamming of doors. It had terrorized the six-year-old; especially the nights when she would sneak from her bedroom and find her father stretched out on the couch. She was too scared to ask what was wrong, so she did what any child would do—she promised God that she would do better so that her Mommy and Daddy could be happy again.
    Then, days before her