Chapter 8 - The Clean Break
Two weeks later, the day before Christmas Eve, I returned to Hollis Manor.
The mud had been cleaned from the kitchen tiles. The broken door had been replaced with solid, reinforced cherry wood, and a new brass lock gleamed in the afternoon sun. Harold’s library was quiet and safe once more, the heavy walnut shelves standing like loyal sentinels guarding the home.
The doorbell chimed softly at two in the afternoon.
I opened the door to find Jade Prescott standing on the porch. She wore a simple wool coat, no makeup, and her hair was tied back in an unpretentious ponytail. She looked five years younger than the polished, hardened woman who had walked into my dining room on Thanksgiving.
She carried a small wooden box wrapped in plain kraft paper.
“Maggie,” she said nervously, keeping her hands tucked around the package. “I... I asked your attorney if it was all right to drop this off. He said it was up to you whether you wanted to see me.”
I looked at her for a long moment. A month ago, I had viewed her as the ultimate enemy, the architect of my marriage’s destruction. Now, I saw her for what she truly was: another casualty of a narcissistic man who used people like building blocks until they collapsed under his weight.
“Come inside for five minutes, Jade,” I said, stepping aside. “It’s freezing.”
She stepped into the foyer, looking up at the high ceiling with an expression of quiet reverence rather than the predatory calculation she had shown before.
“I’m leaving the state tomorrow,” Jade said softly. “I closed my office in the city. My sister lives in Denver; I’m moving there to work as an associate at an urban planning firm. Starting over from zero.”
“That’s probably wise,” I said.
Jade held out the wooden box. “I found this in Daniel’s storage locker when the marshals were cataloging his belongings. It didn’t belong to his business, so they let me take it. I thought... I thought you should have it.”
I opened the box. Inside was Harold’s vintage brass compass, engraved with the initials *H.H.*, and a bundle of handwritten letters Harold had sent to Rosemary during his military service fifty years ago. Daniel had stolen them months earlier, intending to sell them to an antique dealer.
Tears pricked my eyes. “Thank you, Jade.”
Jade looked down at her boots, her voice thick with emotion. “I am so sorry, Maggie. For what I said at dinner. For being too blind and ambitious to see what he was doing to you. When he told me his marriage was a loveless arrangement, I wanted to believe him because it made what I was doing feel acceptable. I was a coward.”
“You made a terrible choice,” I said honestly. “And you hurt me deeply. But you also brought the paramedics. You brought the flash drives. You chose the truth when it mattered most.”
Jade looked up, a bittersweet smile touching her lips. “I hope Clara grows up to be just like her mother.”
She turned, walked down the stone steps of the porch, and drove away down the long, snow-lined driveway, disappearing into the gray winter horizon.
May you like
I shut the heavy front door, locked it, and went back inside to Harold’s study where my daughter was waiting.
***
