The cup of sweet iced tea in my console sweated through its paper sleeve, leaving a ring on the cheap plastic like a warning. The radio crackled, then found Sinatra—low and smooth, the kind of voice that makes you think of diner booths and highway lights and promises people only keep in movies. On my dashboard, a crooked little flag magnet—red, white, and blue, sun-faded from a decade of summers—clung to the vent like stubborn pride.
Leo sat in the passenger seat with his hands flat on his knees, staring at the gates ahead. He was ten, but the quiet way he watched things made him feel older, like he’d already learned the world could change its face without warning. In my bag, the manila folder pressed against my hip.
The corner was marked with a peeling U.S. flag sticker I’d slapped on it years ago, back when I needed my courage to look official. I exhaled slow, tasting June air that still felt like winter.
Then I cut the engine, and we walked up the stone path toward the front door of the Thorne estate. The house sat back from the road in Greenwich the way money likes to sit back—behind hedges trimmed like they were measured, behind ironwork that didn’t keep danger out so much as it kept everyone else from getting too close. A neighbor’s lawn flag waved down the street, and someone’s sprinkler clicked, ticking the seconds like an accusation.
I didn’t come here to start a scene. I came here to finish one. The front door groaned on its hinges when my mother opened it, a low, guttural sound like an old man waking from a deep, troubled sleep.
Ten years. Ten years since I’d turned a key in this lock. Ten years since I’d been told, in no uncertain terms, never to darken this threshold again.
And yet the air inside smelled exactly the same—lemon wax, expensive leather, and the faint metallic tang of prestige, like the house itself was made of polished surfaces and secrets. My mother’s face went white. Eleanor Thorne wore a cream sweater set like it was armor.
Pearls sat at her throat, as if she’d woken up and put them on before she checked the weather, the stock market, or her conscience. “Clara,” she breathed. My father stood behind her, one hand braced against the doorframe like he might slam it shut and erase me all over again.
Arthur Thorne had aged the way men like him always do—more silver at the temples, deeper lines around the mouth, still carved out of certainty. Then his gaze landed on Leo. It snagged.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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