Chapter 8 - BRENDA RAN
Brenda did something very Brenda-like.
She ran.
Not far.
The elevator required a security badge.
She reached the lobby and was stopped before the doors opened.
Unlike Carter and Vanessa, she wasn’t immediately charged with attempted murder.
Her role required more investigation.
So she talked.
A lot.
According to Brenda, Carter told her months earlier that I was “ill” and might not live long.
Then he gradually changed the story.
I was unstable.
I had secretly threatened suicide.
I wandered when distressed.
Brenda admitted suggesting the forest because it was remote.
Her defense was simple.
“I thought he was staging a disappearance after she died naturally.”
The detective stared at her.
“You thought your son planned to dump his wife’s body after a natural death?”
Brenda started crying.
Apparently hearing it spoken aloud reduced its plausibility.
Then investigators confronted her with the kitchen video.
Cleaning the counter.
Hiding the towels.
She changed her story again.
Vanessa had ordered her.
She panicked.
She didn’t know what was in the soup.
Then they played the memorial audio.
You’re the one who said the forest.
By the end of the interview, Brenda had contradicted herself so many times that even her lawyer stopped asking questions.
She was later charged for her role in the conspiracy and for helping conceal evidence.
Meanwhile, Carter’s arrest became public.
The grieving husband narrative collapsed overnight.
Reporters camped outside the estate gates.
Which created an awkward problem.
It was still my house.
I returned once.
Walked through the foyer.
Saw our wedding portrait.
The marble.
The chandelier.
The dining room where Brenda had humiliated me.
Nothing felt like home.
Henderson followed quietly.
“What do you want done with it?”
“Sell it.”
He nodded.
“All of it?”
“The house.”
I looked around.
“Not the land.”
My father had loved the hills surrounding the property.
I wasn’t ready to surrender every memory because Carter contaminated one building.
“What will you do with the land?”
“I don’t know yet.”
That evening, I entered the bedroom Carter and I had shared.
Vanessa’s clothes were already there.
Her perfume on my dresser.
I opened the closet.
Seven years of my clothes hung beside suits belonging to a man who had watched me die.
I expected grief.
Instead, I felt embarrassment.
Not because I had loved him.
Loving someone sincerely was not humiliating.
What embarrassed me was how often I had made myself smaller to keep his affection comfortable.
I had hidden my education.
My money.
My opinions.
My ambition.
Not because Carter demanded every sacrifice.
Sometimes I volunteered them.
That truth hurt.
I removed my father’s watch from the safe.
Then left everything else.
Henderson found me downstairs.
“You’re taking one box?”
“One watch.”
“What about the rest?”
I looked back at the staircase.
“Let the lawyers inventory it.”
I stepped outside.
The night air felt cold.
Clean.
For the first time since the forest, I breathed without tasting blood.
Then Henderson handed me an envelope.
“My father wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before your wedding.”
I stared at him.
“He told me to give it to you only if you ever forgot who you were.”
I almost laughed.
“He waited seven years?”
Henderson looked ashamed.
“So did you.”
Fair.
May you like
I opened the letter.
And my father’s first line made me cry.
