Page 62 of Scarred By Sin

“Gwenyth has begun asking questions about the women. Not about the research or the compounds. About the women themselves. How long do they stay? Where do they sleep? Do I sit with them the way I used to sit with Claudine?”

Nestor noted that the questions weren’t accusatory in tone, but he added an additional observation.

“There is a coldness in her voice that was not there before.”

Brook turned the page.

“She stood outside the library door for over an hour tonight. I was inside the lab, and when I came out through the entrance, she was there. She had not knocked. She had not called out. She was standing in the hallway with her arms at her sides. When I asked what she needed, she said nothing and walked away.”

Nestor documented an argument.

“Gwenyth confronted me in the kitchen this evening. She said I spend more time with strangers than with my own daughter. She said her mother would be ashamed of me. She said the women in the greenhouse are taking me away from her the same way the cancer took her mother, and that I am letting it happen.”

He wrote that he’d tried to explain, tried to tell her that the work was for Claudine.

“I told her that everything I am doing is because I could not save her mother. The woman I loved more than life itself. I am trying to make sure no one else has to suffer that loss.”

The entry ended with a single line.

“Gwenyth listened without expression and then said, very quietly, that I should have loved her enough to stop.”

Brook stopped reading. She removed her hands from the journal and placed them flat on the table, her gloved fingers spread wide against the wood. The baby shifted beneath her ribs, and she became aware of her own breathing in the still of the room. She didn’t need to turn another page. The remaining entries after the argument were sparse. One or two lines here and there.

“I have started locking the lab when I leave.”

“Gwenyth has changed.”

“The girl I raised, the girl who listened to my stories about plants and laughed at the names I gave them, the girl who pressed wildflowers between the pages of my journals and left them for me to find, is not the same person living in this house.”

“I am afraid for my own daughter. Of my own daughter. Why can’t she understand that this is something I need to do?”

The admission did not appear until the bottom portion of the right page.

“I have taken to sleeping in the lab rather than my bedroom.”

“Gwenyth watches me from the upstairs window when I cross the grounds at night. Her face is visible behind the glass. She does not move. She tracks my path between the house and the greenhouse, and she does not look away. I wish she would understand why I need to continue with my research.”

Brook slowly reached for the corner of the page, turning it to the final entries.

“I do not know what to do. I cannot tell Cal. He would insist on intervening, and I am afraid of what she might do if she feels cornered. I cannot tell Porter. He would leave, and then she would be alone with me. I cannot send her away. She is my daughter, and I love her, and I still believe that the girl I raised is somewhere inside the woman she is becoming.”

The very last entry contained only a single date.

Brook closed the journal.

She reached for her phone and texted the team. They needed to understand how volatile the situation had become and what they could be returning to. While the second profile fit closest, the behavioral indicators she’d built pointed to an unidentified male within Nestor’s social circle. Someone with intimate access to the estate, knowledge of the greenhouse, and an emotional relationship with the burial site.

But the subject hadn’t been male.

And the unsub hadn’t merely been among Nestor’s social circle.

She was his daughter.

Brook amended the profile in her mind, testing each element against what the journals had revealed, and Nestor’s death. Blunt force trauma to the left parietal bone caused by a single, heavy blow. Defensive fractures on his right forearm. He’d known it was coming, and he’d raised his arms, although Brook doubted he’d fought back.

Gwenyth would have been eighteen at the time.

Young, but not too young.