When I reached the hotel that night, I could barely breathe. Sophie opened the door herself, balancing on one leg, her face both surprised and relieved.
“You actually came,” she whispered.
I hugged her tightly. “Of course I did. You’re the only reason I’d ever get on a plane.”
Her leg was swollen to the size of a small melon. Getting her to the emergency room was a slow, painful process. The X-rays confirmed it: a fractured tibia. The doctor frowned. “If she’d walked much more on this, the bone could have displaced.”
I clenched my fists. “But she did walk on it—for three hours.”
Later, in the hospital room, Sophie finally told me everything.
“It wasn’t just a fall,” she said quietly. “Ben pushed me. As a joke. I tripped on the stairs. They all saw it happen.”
My throat went dry. “They saw?”
She nodded. “Uncle Mark laughed. Grandma told me to stop crying. Grandpa said I was scaring the tourists.”
I felt a kind of stillness inside me—a sharp, dangerous calm.
When I called my parents, my father answered with an indifferent tone. “Is she okay?”
“She has a broken leg,” I said flatly. “And I have proof.”
He sighed. “Well, it didn’t look that bad at the time. You’re overreacting again.”
Overreacting. Always that word.
That night, I called a lawyer I knew from work. I was a criminal investigator—I knew how to collect evidence. Within days, we obtained the security footage from the historical site.
The video made my hands tremble. Sophie standing at the stairs, smiling with her camera. Ben ran up, pushed her. She fell—out of frame. The adults saw. My brother laughed. My mother looked annoyed. No one moved.
I sent the video to my lawyer. Her reply came quickly: “We’ve got them. Filing charges tomorrow.”
For the first time in my life, I felt no guilt. Only clarity.
They didn’t just fail her. They repeated the same cruelty they’d once used on me. But this time, it was going to cost them.