Chapter 81 - The Edge of New Year
The blizzard howled around us, whipping fine ice needles across the black expanse.
Hoffman lay on his back, his silver hair plastered to his forehead with blood and freezing spray, his expensive coat soaked in lake slush. His cane had vanished into the hole. He looked up at me, his face pale with sudden, terrifying mortality.
I pushed myself up onto my feet. My hands were bloody, my coat shredded, but my eyes were locked on him with cold, merciless clarity.
"You took my mother," I said, stepping toward him. "You took my family. You turned Eleanor into a monster, and you thought you could buy my daughter’s future with a blood ledger."
Hoffman wheezed, clutching his broken leg. "Emma... the Canadian police... they can't protect you from what’s in those files. If you open that box... you destroy the Vance name forever. You destroy your father."
I stopped right beside him, looking down into his desperate, calculating eyes.
"My father died when I walked out of that Christmas dinner," I said. "And the Vance name was dead long before that."
Across the lake, the sirens of three Canadian RCMP patrol cruisers wailed through the storm, their blue and red strobes painting the snowdrifts in vivid, pulsing colors. On the shoreline, two officers in heavy winter gear had already scooped Lily up into their arms, wrapping her in yellow emergency foil as she pointed back toward the ice.
Hoffman let out a low, bitter laugh. "You think it ends at the border, girl? You think I am the only one who holds the Vance debt?"
He reached inside his coat.
I didn't wait to see if he was pulling a gun or a phone. I kicked the heel of my heavy winter boot straight into his chest, knocking him sliding backward across the slick ice toward the open fracture.
He caught the crumbling edge with both hands, dangling over three hundred feet of black, freezing water.
"Emma!" he screamed, his fingers slipping on the wet ice. "Pull me up! Tell them... tell them Claire was alive in 1999!"
The words hit me like a physical blow.
*1999.* Fourteen years after she supposedly jumped from the bridge. The year I turned fifteen.
May you like
Behind me, the megaphone from the Canadian shore boomed across the ice: "RCMP! STAND DOWN! REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE!"
I stood on the precipice, looking down at the man who had controlled three generations of my family’s misery, his freezing fingers slipping millimeter by millimeter from the lip of the dark void, as the clock on my phone chimed the arrival of midnight—and the first second of New Year’s Day.
