Chapter 155 - The Mirror on the Wall
The air inside Blackwood Hall was warm, suffocatingly dry, and heavy with the smell of bees-wax, old leather, and roasting meat.
It was an impossible smell. It was the scent of Thanksgiving morning: sage, butter, caramelized onions, and the faint, bitter tang of cheap gin that my mother used to drink from coffee cups before the guests arrived.
The front entry hall was an exact duplicate of the Greenwich manor, but stripped of its domestic clutter. There were no coats hanging on the brass hooks, no umbrellas in the porcelain stand. The walls were paneled in the same dark quartersawn oak, polished to a mirror finish. But instead of family portraits—the framed photographs of my brother Richard holding his prep school lacrosse trophies, or Eleanor smiling stiffly beside the governor—the walls were covered in monitors.
Dozens of them.
Dull, flat LCD screens recessed flush into the wood, their bezels hidden beneath the moldings.
I stopped dead on the parquet floor, my breath catching in my throat.
Every screen displayed a feed. Not live surveillance feeds of the grounds, but archived video footage.
Screen one: Me at age twelve, sitting on the concrete steps of the tennis court, holding an ice pack against my swollen knee while Eleanor talked to a tennis pro in the background without glancing back.
Screen two: Me at nineteen, sitting in an auditorium at Columbia, frantically typing notes on a broken laptop, wearing a coat two sizes too large to hide the bruises on my shoulders.
Screen three: Me at twenty-six, signing corporate tax documents in the Sterling family office at 2:00 AM, my face gray with exhaustion, surrounded by stacks of red-labeled delinquency notices.
Screen four: Thanksgiving night. Three years ago. The dining room.
The camera angle was high, looking down from the crystal chandelier. On the screen, the frozen frame showed the exact moment before the violence began. My father, his face purple with rage, his fist raised above the porcelain gravy boat. Eleanor sitting at the end of the table, her hands folded primly in her lap, her expression as smooth and indifferent as marble. And me, shrinking back into the high-backed mahogany chair, my hands held up in a pathetic, instinctive gesture of defense.
"You really were a master of endurance," a voice said from the top of the grand staircase.
I turned slowly.
She was standing on the landing, beneath the high stained-glass window that threw diamonds of crimson and amber light onto the carpet.
She wore a charcoal-gray tailored wool suit, identical to the one I had worn to my first board meeting when I took over the management of the Sterling holding companies. Her hair was cut into the same sharp, chin-length bob I had kept for seven years. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, free of the faint scar above the right eyebrow where my father’s signet ring had split my flesh when I was sixteen.
She had my eyes. My nose. My mouth.
May you like
She was what I would have looked like if I had never been struck. If I had never been starved. If I had never been made to pay the debts of a broken family with pieces of my own sanity.
"Hello, Emily," she said. Her smile was small, polite, and entirely empty. "I believe you’re twenty minutes late for dinner."
