Chapter 5
In the second week, Brielle asked permission to visit Greenfield Nursing Home. Vaughn drove her without a word, already knowing the destination by heart. Penny sat by the window in a wheelchair. Twenty-two years old. Eyes turned outward but fixed on nothing. Her face still held the outline of the gap-toothed girl laughing on the back steps, but her eyes had gone out eleven years earlier, the moment her head struck a wooden floor in an apartment on Ashland.
Brielle pulled a chair beside her and took her sister’s hand. “Penny. It’s me. Brie.” Nothing. She talked anyway — about the room with the bathroom that didn’t leak, about an old woman named Dorothy who made pancakes every morning, about a five-year-old named Maeve who kept drawing pictures of three people holding hands. “I’m learning to be stronger. There’s an old man teaching me. He says I fight with pain, and pain runs out.” She swallowed. Then the words she had carried for eleven years came up whole. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m sorry about that night. I’m sorry I stood there and didn’t do anything. I’m sorry I ran.”
Her voice broke on the last word.
And Penny’s fingers tightened. Barely. So slightly that if Brielle hadn’t already been holding on, she never would have felt it. A nurse would have called it a muscle spasm. Brielle believed it was something else. She cried then — not the sixty-second ration she had allowed herself for years, but real crying, shoulders shaking, tears falling onto her sister’s hand without limit, for the first time in longer than she could remember.
On the drive back, Vaughn broke his silence to inform her that Jude had already arranged for Penny’s transfer to Lakeshore Institute — private room, top neurologists, every cost covered, effective the following Monday. Brielle’s anger arrived instantly and hot. She had Vaughn stop the car and walked straight into Jude’s study without knocking.
“I don’t need charity,” she said, her voice trembling with fury. “My sister isn’t a tool to keep me here.”
Jude looked up from behind his desk, unsurprised. “That’s not charity. That’s investment. You can’t protect my family if you’re lying awake every night wondering whether there’s enough money for your sister’s care. I’m removing the interfering variable.” A pause. “Don’t confuse strategy with kindness.”
May you like
She wanted to throw every word back in his face. But underneath the anger, she knew he was right. She walked out without another word.
That night, near midnight, unable to sleep, Brielle passed the closed door of the west wing and heard Jude’s voice through a crack of yellow light. A man knelt on the floor inside, hands bound, face bruised. Jude sat across from him, speaking in a voice so calm it was almost tender — the same voice he had used to tell Maeve that her mother had liked roses. The subject wasn’t roses. Brielle walked away before she heard anything more. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering where the line was between protecting a family and serving a killer. She looked at the crayon drawing of three people holding hands, and understood that her compass wasn’t Jude. It was an old woman who made pancakes every morning, and a five-year-old who believed purple butterflies could carry you through clouds. As long as that compass kept pointing true, she would stay.
