Thicker Than Water

Trial and Error

As Wildy predicted, the story of the reporter and her shadow, and how their pasts were entwined, hit the press two days later. Wildy disappeared with her father shortly after leaving Miles’ house, returned only to participate in all the necessary elements of the trial.

At every step, the trial was brutal; Sparks' lawyers whipped the media into a frenzy, using it to turn court proceedings into a circus.

It was said from the very beginning that Wildy’s mother was an opportunist, trying to make a name for herself by taking down a tycoon like Sparks. She'd been one renegade reporter gunning for the CEO, one person fighting an entire company. Her investigation had been patchy, her findings inconclusive. She was motivated by greed, the defense said, would not stop until she had felled Sparks.

The defense ordered DNA comparison between Sparks and Miles and upon proving that they were indeed father and son managed to suggest that the whole case was a fabrication, imagined by Miles himself in an attempt to frame his father after years of neglect. Miles hated the man, and there could be no denying it; it didn't play well before the jury and they knew it.

Wildy's father was named as a possible suspect, bringing to light an affair. It was true. Wildy hadn't even known until her father took the stand. It threw his alcoholism into knew light – what she had taken to be a grieving man's need to drown his sorrows she realized was actually an unfaithful man's urgency to numb his guilt. Sparks' lawyers played it beautifully, the guilty man drinking himself into oblivion, unable to erase the remorse he felt at having stabbed his wife to death.

That was the worst day.

That night James, Wildy’s father, ate alone. He cooked and cleaned and waited for his daughter to arrive to her childhood home for hours. She had stormed from the courtroom after his testimony. She finally showed well after 11pm. She sat and watched him, studied him, taking in his features in attempt to extract the man she knew as a child, the man who was madly in love with her mother.  She had no idea how she could've missed it.

"How could you do that to her?" Wildy whispered.

"It's not what you think Wilhelmina."

"It's not what I think?" She mocked.

"You were too young to understand. You don't know what it was like."

"That was my Mom. That was your wife."

"And she was working every hour on that damned Hitchins case. Things were a mess."

"You didn't think it would be a good idea to try and sort things out? I thought you loved her daddy."

James stood, angry.

"Don't! Don't sit here and accuse me of not loving her."

How dare he be the one angry? Now she was on her feet. "Your love does no one any good daddy!" she screamed. "Your kind of love finds other women to screw while his wife is trying to make a difference in the world. Your kind of love abandons his daughter to alcohol after her mom and sister dies."

Suddenly she's 17 again, dragging him out of bars after his weekend benders, calling his job with creative fabrications of why he won’t be at work (again), hiding his car keys so he can’t make his nightly liquor runs.  She couldn't hold back the whimper.

“When she needs you. When you're the only thing she has left," she says and her voice is small and broken. 

James tried to reach out to minimize the need for tears but she flexed away. "Real love is complicated Wildy, really difficult. You of all people should know that. Don't think I haven't noticed that Miles Fleming fellow. The way he looks at you, the way he lights up when he's with you. His love for you is practically oozing out of his pores yet you, like your mother, chose Sparks over the man who cares about you."