Page 36 of Scarred By Sin

Gwenyth deserved to hear this from someone who had no stake in what happened next.

“Bit, when Dale arrives, tell him I’m upstairs with Gwenyth. We’ll be down shortly.”

Bit looked up from his laptop. Whatever he read in her expression, he didn’t question it.

“Got it.”

Brook crossed the foyer and placed her hand on the banister. The wood was cool beneath her palm, worn smooth by decades of use. The staircase rose above her, splitting at the landing. Somewhere behind a closed door at the end of the right-hand corridor, a woman who had already lost her father was about to learn that the last person who had chosen to stay had been taken from her, too.

16

Brooklyn Sloane

July 2026

Thursday — 3:33 pm

Brook stood outside Gwenyth’s door for a moment before raising her hand to knock.

The second-floor hallway was narrow and dim. The carpet was worn thin along the center, the path made from decades of footsteps tracing the same route between the bedroom and the staircase. Several framed photographs hung along the wall, though the glass was too smudged for Brook to make out the images from where she stood.

She knocked. Three soft, measured strikes.

No answer.

She waited a full thirty seconds, listening for movement on the other side. Nothing. No footsteps, no creak of furniture, no indication that anyone was aware of her presence. The corridor was so quiet that she could hear her own breathing and the faint tick of the clock from the floor below.

She knocked again, harder this time.

“Gwenyth, it’s Brook Sloane. I need to speak with you.”

The force of the second knock pushed the door inward. It hadn’t been latched, and it swung open in a slow arc that revealed the room beyond.

Gwenyth was sitting in a high-backed chair by the window, her legs drawn beneath her and the gray cardigan wrapped around her frame like a second skin. She was facing the greenhouse, her gaze rather distant. She didn’t turn when Brook entered.

The room was smaller than she had expected for a private suite in a house this size. A single bed with a white coverlet, neatly made, the pillows arranged in such a way that suggested routine rather than care. A dresser against the far wall held a framed photograph of a man and woman standing in front of the greenhouse. The man was tall and thin with dark hair, and the woman beside him was smiling in a way that transformed her entire face.

Nestor and Claudine.

Taken at a time before grief had claimed this family and refused to let go.

A narrow bookshelf beside the bed held a row of leather-bound volumes that Brook recognized as botanical books, their spines cracked and softened from years of handling. On the windowsill, a collection of small ceramic pots held dried seedlings, their stems brittle and brown, relics of a girl who had once been given living things to tend by a man who wanted to teach her that patience could produce something beautiful. Now all that remained were remnants of death.

Brook’s gaze moved to the nightstand.

A glass of water sat beside a small ceramic dish. In it were several loose pills, different shapes and sizes, none in a bottle, none labeled. Just pills, resting in plain sight, the way mints might sit in a bowl on a receptionist's desk. Ordinary and unexplained.

Brook cataloged the detail without letting her attention linger. No prescription bottle meant no label. No label meant no way to identify what Gwenyth was taking, or who had provided it, without having the pills analyzed. Brook would need to come back for a sample, or ask Bit to arrange for one, but not now. Not during this conversation.

She pulled over the only other chair in the room, a wooden straight-back from beside the dresser, and positioned it near Gwenyth without crowding her. The legs scraped softly against the hardwood, and Gwenyth’s head turned a fraction at the sound before settling back toward the window.

Brook sat down and rested her hands in her lap.

“Gwenyth, I have something to tell you, and I wanted you to hear it from me rather than from anyone else.”

Gwenyth rested her bare feet on the floor and laced her fingers together over the fabric of the cardigan. She didn’t turn from the window, but her breathing changed, the rhythm slowing in the way it does when a body braces for something it already senses is coming.

“Porter was in an accident this afternoon,” Brook said as gently as she could. “His truck was found on County Road Nine. I’m very sorry, Gwenyth. He didn’t survive.”