At sixteen, I ran away after my own sister stabbed me—and my parents blamed me – BICHNHU

I still remember the cold rush that hit my body when I saw him standing in the hallway outside the hospital ward. I hadn’t seen my father, Mark, in over a decade. He looked older—hair thinner, shoulders slumped—but the sharpness in his eyes hadn’t changed.

The last time I saw those eyes, they were filled with annoyance as I bled on the carpet. Now they were pretending to be warm.

“Lily,” he said as if we were old friends catching up. “You look… different.”

“I have work,” I replied, trying to walk past him, but he blocked the way.

“Your mother is worried sick. Harper too. We all are.”

I almost laughed. “You’re twelve years too late for that.”

He sighed dramatically. “You’re still angry. I get it. But you need to take responsibility for your part in what happened.”

“My part?” I snapped. “She stabbed me.”

“Because you provoked her,” he said firmly, like it was an undeniable fact carved into history. “And you running away made us look like abusive parents. You destroyed your mother emotionally.”

I felt my hands shaking—not with fear, but rage. The audacity of rewriting the past so confidently was almost impressive.

He reached for my arm. Instinctively, I stepped back. The movement only made his expression harden.

“You owe your sister an apology before her wedding,” he said. “She’s accomplished so much. Don’t ruin her special day because you’re holding onto childish grudges.”

Childish. Grudges. It was like he’d rehearsed the words.

He lowered his voice. “Look, Lily… if you don’t come back and set things straight, the community will never stop talking. We’ve told everyone you had emotional problems when you were young. But if you show up now—calm, polite—people will believe us. They’ll see we raised you right.”

So there it was. The truth. They didn’t want reconciliation. They wanted reputation management. They wanted the daughter they abandoned to restore their image.

I stared at him, my breath tight. “You want me to lie so you can look good?”

“We want you to be mature,” he snapped. “You embarrassed us enough.”

In that moment, I saw everything clearly—why they enabled Harper, why they blamed me, why they never cared about what happened: appearances meant more to them than children.

I said quietly, “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

His jaw clenched. “If you don’t cooperate, Lily, we will have to tell people you’re unstable. You ran away, after all. That doesn’t look normal.”

This time, I did laugh. “Do whatever you want.”