Chapter 2
Claire
My mother had been dead for four days when they found her body hanging from one of the beams of her vaulted ceiling. It would have taken a longer time to find out about her suicide if the driver delivering whatever she ordered on Amazon hadn’t looked in the front window and called 911. Her body had already passed through rigor mortis and back into a relaxed state where bacteria started breaking down the tissues, eating away at her skin.
I can still smell it, days later, as I pack up her few belongings.
“Claire? Would you mind terribly if I head down the mountain before the storm fully hits? I don’t want to get stuck in the snow.”
I look up through my tears toward the voice. Maria Lowell hadn’t changed a bit in the last ten years. Still the Montgomery’s maid, still keeping all their dirty little secrets. I sniffle and nod my head. I don’t want to be alone, but I can’t ask her to stay. This is far too personal, and I have way too many questions that I doubt she’ll be able to answer for me. Besides, I want to get out of this place as fast as I possibly can, before anyone finds out I was ever here. I don’t want to be tangled up in any of this. I have my own problems that are piling up at an alarming rate right now; my mother’s suicide is just the icing on a shit-filled cake.
I hang my head in my hands and press my palms into my tears. Instantly the couch cushion dips next to me and Ms. Lowell takes my hands and pulls them to her lap. “Oh, Claire. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for your loss.”
My loss.Right.
I clear my throat and shrug. “Yeah, thanks.” Inside my blood boils and my teeth clench.Losingsomeone means at some point you had them, and I never had Libby Radcliffe. And now I’llreallynever have her, because she’s dead. And all of it was her choice. Everything was always her way or no way at all.
Ms. Lowell tilts her head and sighs. “When was the last time you saw your mother?”
I dart my eyes up to meet hers and bark out a bitter laugh. “Uh, let’s see,” I say, removing my hands from her grip and wiping my eyes again. “Five years, maybe.” Five years. I didn’t even know where she lived. And I would have never thought it was less than an hour’s drive away from me, in a luxurious mountain retreat.
Ms. Lowell sighs next to me and pats my back.
“I didn’t know she lived here. I didn’t know about—” The words die on my tongue. I just gesture vaguely at a framed pictured of my mother and Mr. Montgomery. After all this time, after all that’s happened, how could she still have been his mistress?
Selfish fucking assholes, the both of them.
In my back pocket my phone beeps. I cry more.
“Oh, Claire. You poor thing.” She shifts her body to face me. “I never did feel right about their arrangement. But your mother and Silas Montgomery were—”
“Please don’t. I don’t want to hear about any fairy tale love story. They were two very selfish people, and I just want to clean up whatever she had here and put it all where it belongs, in the trash.”
“You need to forgive her, Claire.” She leans closer and pulls my chin up gently with a finger. “You look just like her, you know?”
A chill crawls down my spine and I lean back, away from her touch. “Yeah, well that’s been pretty much a curse for me, you know? Looking exactly like the whore who tore through the famous Montgomery family.” I didn’t even bat my eyes two weeks ago when I heard the news about Mr. Montgomery’s passing. I hadn’t seen a Montgomery in ten years, and I certainly hadn’t spoken to one or evenaboutone.
I heard about it on the morning news as I got ready for work. Apparently, multi-billionaire Silas Montgomery went for an hour-long jog each morning around his estate, rain or shine, even if it snowed. Except, on that particular day, he never came home. By the time anyone in the house realized he’d never returned from his daily exercise routine, it was dinnertime, and he’d been dead of a massive heart attack a quarter of a mile into his run.
His loving wife held a press conference asking for privacy during the family’s time of grief. There was a slow sweep of the camera over the family, but I cut off the television dead before I could glimpse any of the Montgomery faces that once filled my heart with pure happiness.
Now they could all go fuck themselves.
A little more than a week later my mother committed suicide because the love of her life,another woman’s husband, she could not possibly live without. I guess she forgotagainshe had a daughter to stick around for.
“You need to forgive her, Claire, or everything in your life will be shadowed by your bitterness. You’ll never find happiness for yourself.”
Ah, no.
“My mother abandoned me for the man in that picture.Twice.” My phone beeps again in my pocket and I cringe. I can’t take it out and look at it in front of Ms. Lowell. She’ll know something is wrong and what’s going on in my life is none of her business. I’ll deal with whatever it is, I don’t need anyone pretending they could help me with their fake worry. Not when they never showed concern for me or my welfare before. I wasn’t part of the Montgomery family—wasn’t even a thought to any of them, and that became blatantly clear when I was fifteen years old.
I avoid looking in her eyes and try to bring her attention to the big bay windows with my best expression of complete and utter horror, plus some excessively dramatic finger pointing. “Wow, that snow is really coming down now.” I wasn’t lying either; a few inches had accumulated since I arrived here an hour ago and I can’t have Ms. Lowell stuck here at the cabin with me. Not when I had my own secrets to deal with here. I need her to leave and I need her to leave soon.
We both stand up from the couch at the same time, me shifting away, her moving toward me. “Let me fix you up a bit first,” she mumbles, pulling a tissue out from her apron pocket and dabbing my cheek with it. “Would you like some eyedrops for your eyes? They look so raw.”
She’s worried about how red my eyes look from crying? That must be something she’s used to working for the high-maintenance elite, because I wouldn’t care if my eyes turned purple with tears, it’s not like I’d be posting any selfies from here at thetainted Montgomery love shack.
“No,” I mutter, pulling myself away. “I’m just worried about you driving down the mountain in all this snow.” I hammer the idea in by grabbing her coat off the coat rack and helping her into it. “The weather reports were saying we could get over a foot here.”
