Page 130
“The night she died, I was not present. She’d told me she didn’t need me anymore. That she had refined the technique. That she could handle it alone. I left her to it.”
Another beat.
“When I found her, I assumed the worst had finally happened. And I considered—for several long minutes—reporting it exactly as it was. But then I saw the bruises. The ligature marks. I realized they matched those from Henry’s death. And I… had a thought.”
He lifts one shoulder.
“That if someone happened to have been poisoning her, and I’d reported the truth immediately, they might be caught, depending upon how long such a thing would stay in someone’s system. Maybe even accused of worse, since it very much looked like she’d been strangled. And I found I didn’t mind the idea of her lying on the floor just a bit longer than necessary if it meant a decreased likelihood that anything might show up in her system if tested. I don’t know how that works, but I had hoped. I’d spent years watching her disintegrate, first a moral type of decay, then mentally. And most recently, physically. She told me her blood felt too loud. I assumed it was madness, at first—until the refrigerator started speaking.
Not in sentences, of course. Just pieces. Hellebore. Evidence. ‘She did it.’ Random phrases playing on repeat. But it was always Emily’s name that came after. The implication wasn’t subtle. And after that, well—my options were limited.”
“Choke me, Daddy.”
He glances at Emily, just briefly. “I worried it might actually be her. And with that possibility constantly sitting in the back of my mind… Well, it made a lot of choices for me. What if there was poison in her system? What if it had also been a contributing factor? It was mere luck that Baryn took care of the staging and paperwork shortly after. I was…unaware that it was him, but I did not question it.”
I don’t know who in the room is the most dumbfounded.
“Victoria deserved it,” Giles says finally. “Every drop of it. Whether it was justice or erotic misadventure, I didn’t feel compelled to clarify. The lariat was still around her throat. Her skin was marked.” He pauses. “And frankly, the entire affair was far too humiliating to put in writing.”
His gaze drops for a beat, fingers smoothing over the cuff of his sleeve. “I took the lariat. I put it in my coat pocket and walked it out the back door. Buried it shallowly in the woods behind the greenhouse, far enough to cast doubt, but close enough that—if found—it might suggest someone dropped it fleeing the property. An intruder, not a family member.” He exhales, not quite a sigh. “I don’t know if it was the right call. But in the moment, it felt—necessary. Efficient. A way to protect what little order we had left.”
Theo rubs a hand over his face. I’m standing entirely still, maybe not even breathing.
I don’t know what to think, what to feel.
“Choke me, Daddy,” the refrigerator offers again, seemingly louder this time.
Giles turns, walks over to it, and without a word, punches it squarely in the side.
The voice box stutters. Glitches. Falls mercifully silent.
He straightens his jacket, returns to the room.
“That should do it.”
No one says a goddamn thing.
29
FINDINGS INCONCLUSIVE
LILA
The suitcase won’t close.
Of course it won’t. Because nothing fucking fits anymore.
I shove a pair of jeans in. A bra gets jammed into the corner. A tangled charger. The shirt I was wearing the night we arrived.
I should be packing methodically. But my hands are trembling, my heart’s in my throat, and every item I touch feels like it belonged to a different person. A different life.
And maybe it did.
Because that version of me—the one who arrived here with answers to find and a heart half-stitched together—she didn’t know what it meant to watch justice corrode from the inside out.
She didn’t know that sometimes a body dies slowly, not from one fatal blow, but from a hundred microfractures.
I shove a book into my bag hard enough to bend the spine.
