When I showed the letter to Rosalind, her expression was a quiet storm of old trauma and lingering pain. She didn’t demand revenge or forbid me from going; she simply held my hand and said, “Whatever you decide, remember who we had to become to survive her.”
That night, I drove to the decaying estate alone. The grand foyer smelled of dust and unyielding stubbornness. I found Genevieve propped up in a makeshift medical bed in the parlor, looking impossibly small against the velvet cushions. The iron will that had once broken families and forged corporate signatures was now trapped inside a failing, skeletal frame.
She didn’t apologize. Instead, her dull eyes flared with a familiar, desperate pride as she looked at me. “You… you managed to keep the resorts,” she whispered, her voice rattling in her chest. “But you gave everything else to a stranger.”
“She was never a stranger, Mother,” I replied, my voice steady, stripped of the anger I thought I’d always carry. “She was the only real thing in a world you built out of glass and lies. The boys aren’t coming. They will never know the woman who tried to erase them.”
