Chapter 4 - The Unraveling Veneer
The name hung in the air like a tripwire: your brother.
Allison blinked, her painted eyelashes fluttering in confusion. “Brother? Richard doesn't have a brother. He’s an only child.”
Richard didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat worked silently, his Adam’s apple bobbing above his collar, his skin turning from the gray of wet cement to the yellow of curdled milk. He looked at his father with eyes full of an old, poisonous guilt that had clearly been festering in the dark for years.
“He had a brother,” Collins said, his voice dropping into a quiet, lethal calm. “His name was Patrick. Lieutenant Patrick Collins. Annapolis class of 2018. Chief Engineer on the USS Hawthorne.”
The room seemed to tilt.
I stood there, my hand resting on the back of the metal chair, feeling the phantom heat of the Hawthorne’s lower deck plates burning through the rubber soles of my boots again. Five years ago. The smell of burning insulation. The screech of tortured steel as twelve hundred tons of Atlantic seawater rushed into the starboard shaft alley.
Patrick.
He was twenty-four years old. He had his father’s stubborn gray eyes and a smile that could talk a supply clerk out of three spare fuel injectors. When the second blast buckled the watertight door to the auxiliary engine space, Patrick had been inside, three decks below the waterline, clearing the jammed hydraulic valve that was keeping the ventilation dampers from suffocating thirty-four men in the forward berthing.
Allison turned on Richard, her voice shrill, the bridal mask slipping off completely. “You told me your family was just you and your father! You told me there were no other heirs to the trust!”
A murmur broke out among the guests at the front tables—the Dallas associates, the country club set, the people who had flown up on chartered jets to celebrate the union of two old-money dynasties.
“You lied to me?” Allison hissed, grabbing Richard’s lapel. “You told me your father was holding back the estate because of his retirement! You told me—”
“Shut up, Allison!” Richard snarled, shaking her off with a violent jerk of his arm that sent her bridal bouquet tumbling to the floor. The white gardenias bruised against the dark parquet. “Just shut your mouth!”
“Don't you tell me to shut up!” she screamed, her southern lilt vanishing into the flat, ugly rasp of a woman who had just realized she had bought a counterfeit watch. “My father put a second mortgage on the lake house to pay for this reception! We spent eighty thousand dollars on this ballroom because you said your father would announce the foundation partnership tonight!”
My father, Robert Miller, stepped forward, his face hollowed out. “Richard? Is that true? You told us your father had already approved the transfer.”
Richard didn't look at my father. He looked at the floor, his shoulders hunched, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“He didn't approve anything,” Admiral Collins said, stepping past Richard as if he were an empty coat hanging on a peg. “Because I don't give foundation money to cowards who change their names on family registries to avoid remembering that their younger brother died in a fire.”
“He didn't die!” Richard screamed, his face contorting into an ugly, tear-streaked mask of rage. “He didn't die, Dad! You just wish it was me instead of him!”
The words hit the ballroom like an explosive charge.
Two women at Table Four stood up, gathered their shawls, and hurried toward the coat check. The wedding was over. The theater had collapsed, leaving only the rotting boards of the stage exposed for everyone to see.
“No, Richard,” a new voice said from the back of the room.
The voice was young, clean, and carried the unmistakable metallic ring of an artificial larynx.
The double doors of the ballroom—the ones leading out to the hotel’s oceanfront terrace—swung open against the wind.
The fog from the harbor rolled into the room, cold and tasting of brine. And through the mist, walking down the center aisle with the slow, measured cadence of a man who had spent three years learning how to use a rebuilt pelvis, came a young man in full naval dress whites.
His left sleeve was pinned flat against his ribs—empty from the shoulder down. The left side of his neck and jaw was a landscape of pale, grafted skin, smooth and hairless under the chandelier light.
Patrick Collins.
He stopped ten paces behind his father.
He looked at Richard with a sorrow so deep it seemed older than the sea itself. Then his eyes drifted across the room, past the flowers, past the ruined cake, until they locked onto me.
May you like
The boy who had spent six hours trapped behind five inches of superheated armor plate while the water rose to his chin lifted his remaining hand to his temple.
“Captain on deck,” Patrick whispered through his throat valve, the mechanical hum of the speaker carrying across three hundred silent people. “Good evening, Skipper.”
