Chapter 4
Father regained consciousness the next morning.
Inside the garden house.
Not a hospital.
Calista had brought a private nurse.
One I did not know.
Paid personally.
Father could speak.
Move one arm normally.
Needed help walking.
“What did she tell you?”
Father looked at Calista.
“That I was dead.”
My jaw tightened.
Calista corrected:
“I told him everyone believed he was.”
Not better.
She had taken Father’s phone.
His watch.
His ring.
Sent messages to his driver saying he planned to stay alone overnight.
Then staged an accident story involving the old furnace room.
No body.
Only burned personal effects.
She told us Father had gone into the garden house during a small electrical fire and nothing recognizable remained.
I had been away negotiating a family conflict.
By the time I returned, the fire damage had been cleaned.
The urn waiting.
I trusted her because she cried beside me.
That memory almost made me sick.
“Why didn’t Father leave?”
Tilda answered softly.
“He couldn’t at first.”
Calista had the outside stair door locked.
The nurse came twice daily.
Food delivered through the service entrance.
Father’s mobility improved slowly.
By month three, he could stand with help.
By month four, he tried to leave.
Calista changed the lock.
“You could have shouted.”
Father smiled bitterly.
“To gardeners fifty yards away?”
He did.
Twice.
Calista moved him to the upstairs room afterward.
Thicker walls.
Windows facing the closed orchard.
No guards.
No chains.
Just isolation shaped carefully enough that an elderly man with a wheelchair could not defeat a door.
“Why keep him alive?”
I asked Calista.
She looked offended.
As though murder was the only line that mattered.
“I never wanted him dead.”
“You gave me ashes.”
“I wanted him gone.”
Different sentence.
Important.
“What were you waiting for?”
Her face changed.
“The wedding.”
Of course.
She planned to marry me first.
Then?
She wanted Father to record a confession.
After the wedding, once she believed I could not dismiss her as an outsider seeking revenge, she would reveal both him and the truth.
I laughed once.
Cold.
“You thought marriage would make your deception easier to forgive?”
“No.”
She looked at me.
“I thought it would make it harder for you to choose him over me.”
May you like
There.
The entire plan reduced to fear of losing a competition I had never known existed.
