Chapter 6 - The Lighthouse Road-6
The revelation hit me like a physical blow. I sank heavily into the velvet chair, my knees suddenly refusing to support my weight.
“If... if they didn't go into the river,” I stammered, my chest tightening as the nitroglycerin pill dissolved on my tongue, releasing a bitter chemical burn down my throat, “if Clara met you at the lighthouse road... where are they now, Gwen? Where have they been for forty years?”
Gwen took a slow sip of her scotch, her eyes fixed on the flickering flames of the grand stone fireplace across the foyer.
“We tried to hide them, Andrew,” she said quietly, her voice dropping the defensive edge it had carried moments before. “We thought that by faking their deaths, by letting the police close the file and letting you grieve an immutable tragedy, Marcus would lose interest. We thought we could spirit them away to Canada under new identities.”
“Then why didn't you?” I demanded, leaning forward, my hands gripping the armrests. “Why are you living here like a prisoner in this tomb? Why didn't Clara ever contact me?”
“Because Marcus found us,” Gwen said, her voice turning hard as flint. “Three days after the staged car crash, while Clara and the children were being sheltered in a safehouse near Bangor, Marcus’s men tracked us down. They didn't want the children for a syndicate anymore, Andrew. Marcus had gone rogue. He wanted leverage over me. He wanted the entire Sterling estate signed over to his shell companies, or he would butcher Clara and the kids in front of my eyes.”
“So you gave it to him,” I whispered.
“I had no choice,” Gwen snapped, turning to face me squarely, her pale eyes flashing with sudden, raw emotion. “I signed over every cent, every deed, every piece of land. And in exchange, Marcus promised to put Clara, Leo, and Maya on a freighter bound for South America—out of his reach, out of mine, completely safe.”
“And you believed him?” I scoffed bitterly. “A criminal like Marcus Vance?”
“I didn't have a choice!” Gwen shouted, slamming her glass down onto the mahogany table. The amber liquid splashed over the rim, staining the wood. “It was the only play on the board! But the freighter... the freighter never made it to South America, Andrew. Three days out of port, during a severe nor’easter off the Nova Scotia coast, the ship went down with all hands on board. No survivors.”
The silence that followed was absolute, suffocating, and terrifying.
My heart gave a violent, stuttering leap. The room spun wildly, the walls blurring into streaks of gray and brown.
Dead.
After forty years of believing they had vanished into a river, after daring to hope that the rusted box in the mattress held a key to a joyous reunion... the truth was even more grotesque. They had survived the initial nightmare, only to be swallowed by the black, freezing depths of the Atlantic during a forgotten storm.
“No,” I choked out, clutching my chest as a blinding pain radiated down my left arm. “No... you’re lying. You’re lying to protect yourself.”
“Why would I lie now, Andrew?” Gwen whispered, her voice cracking slightly as she stepped toward me, her hard exterior finally fracturing. “I’ve spent forty years living in this mausoleum, haunted by the ghost of every choice I made. I didn't want any of this. I was just trying to save my sister.”
My vision tunneled. The amber light of the chandelier fractured into a million blinding pinpricks of white.
May you like
My knees buckled as I slid off the velvet chair onto the hardwood floor, gasping for air that wouldn't reach my lungs. The pain in my chest was no longer a warning flutter; it was an iron fist crushing my heart from the inside out.
As the darkness closed in around me, the last thing I saw was Gwen dropping to her knees beside me, her mouth moving in silent panic as the grand entryway spun away into nothingness.
