Chapter 4 - The Price of Silence
I didn't go back to Ruth’s farm that night. I drove out to the old overlook near Lake Martin, where the water stretched out like a sheet of dark glass under the moonlight.
Everything I thought I knew about my life—my isolation, my hospital stay at eighteen, the endless weekends away, the locked door—wasn’t about me at all. I had been cast in a play I never auditioned for, playing a ghost to soothe the grief of a woman who wasn't even my mother.
My phone started ringing around 9:00 PM.
It was Mitch. I let it ring out to voicemail. Then it rang again. And again. Finally, I answered.
“Stace, where are you?” Mitch’s voice was ragged, frantic. “Mom and Dad are losing their minds. Dad said you found out about the Lockhearts.”
“Are you sitting down, Mitch?” I asked, my voice terrifyingly calm. “Or did you know all along?”
There was a long, heavy silence on the other end of the line. The kind of silence that confirms every worst-case scenario you could possibly invent.
“Mitch?”
“I found out when I was sixteen,” he said, the words tumbling out in a rush. “I walked into the study and heard Dad talking to our lawyer on the phone about the trust fund Robert Lockheart set up for Suzanne's peace of mind. Stace... Robert Lockheart has been paying our mortgage for twelve years. He paid for my college. He paid for my Jeep.”
My stomach churned. The betrayal cut deeper than my parents' cruelty. My own brother had watched me pack my duffel bag every single weekend, had watched me get locked out of my own room, and had stayed silent because his tuition was being paid by a dead girl's father.
“You knew,” I whispered. “And you let them do it to me every single week.”
“What was I supposed to do?” he cried out. “Blow up our whole family? Ruin everything? You had a place to go—Ruth’s farm, you liked it there!”
“I liked it there because I wasn't allowed here, Mitch!”
“Listen to me,” Mitch said, his tone shifting from pleading to desperate. “You need to come back. Right now. Suzanne Lockheart is at the house.”
I froze. “What?”
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“She came over ten minutes ago. She saw your car leave. She talked to Mom and Dad, and now... Stace, she’s driving out toward the lake. She knows you found out. And she thinks you're the one who’s been lying to her all these years.”
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