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He snorts. “Yeah, well. That's how I feel. I'm in my head all day long. Have been for almost forty years. Trust me, there's no one else up there."
With that, he pulls away from me and strides toward the kitchen. I wait to see what he is going to do, but then he’s shrugging into a brown canvas jacket and heading out of the double front doors. Less than a minute later, I hear the roar of his car.
I let him leave and wonder who will return.
Chapter 64 - Brant
It's not possible, yet she's not lying. She can't be. Everything about that interaction screamed truth.
I need Jillian. I need to look in her face and find out the truth. I press my hand to my fist, and the stress is sitting there, like a giant steel anvil, pinning my breath in place.
It’s time for a pill. A blackout is coming, pushing on the edge of my sanity with greedy feelings, and my mind's source of relief is simple in its black oblivion.
But maybe I shouldn’t. After a decade of the medication, I’m suddenly suspicious of the pale pill that calms my world, refocuses my anxiety, and lets me sleep. A pill a day keeps my normal life in play. That’s what Jillian always said.
Is everything I've known a lie? How deep does this level of deception go?
Two decades ago, on December twelfth, I blacked out. When I came to, half of Jillian's face was beaten in, her eyes puffy slits, two teeth missing from her smile, her lip split. They said I had gone crazy. Jill had tried to pacify me and I had turned on her, windmilling punches and kicks until I knocked her onto the ground and climbed on top of her. Continued the beating until I ran out of steam, then apparently stood, took the stairs up to the living room, and watchedJudge Judyuntil my parents got home. I don’t remember that part. I woke up in a children's psych ward with no memory of the exchange.
That was back when I used to have blackouts. It was explained that they were my brain's way of coping with the pressures that my intellect forced on it. Spots in time where I would act in a manner that made no sense. The longest lasted five hours. Two decades ago Jillian found a doctor who solved my problem and provided a cocktail of meds that calmed my dark demons. The blackouts stopped, my only moments of dark occurring when the drowsiness side effect knocked me out. I've lived without a relapse for decades.
Blackouts. That is what I’ve been told, what I believe.
I push harder on the gas, my hands trembling against the steering wheel. I need to see Jillian. She is at the root of all of this. She will have the answers.
She always does.
Chapter 65 - Brant
Jillian is standing on her home’s front entrance when I pull in. In a city filled with modern monstrosities, she found the scariest and ugliest of them all—a giant grey stone box, with thin strips of glass that dissected the surface in hard right angles that cut diagonally across each room. Layana had taken one look at the house and declared that it would be impossible to find curtains for it—such a strange observation but a hypothesis that was proven true when I first walked in. The interior wasn’t any warmer than the exterior—all white furnishings, gold hardware and black marble accents. Voices echoed in the house, and if you left without running into a sharp edge, you were more coordinated than me.
I park in one of the empty spots off her circular drive, beside a wall of tall thin cacti that resemble twelve feet tall cucumbers. I step out of the Aston Martin and swing the door shut, then lock it with my fob.
As I take the pebbled path toward the front door, I lock eyes with my aunt. Wind buffers the long black coat around her, her hands tucked in its pockets, a resolute look on the face of a woman I love as much as my mother. As I climb the deep front steps, we hold the long look. There’s fear on her face and I try to understand it, but I've never been so confused.
I reach the top of the entrance landing, and it’s a stark wide platform, empty of anything but columns. Jillian steps backward, keeping distance between us, then turns and walks rapidly toward the lime green double front doors. As she approaches, the lamps on either side glow brighter, illuminating the path, and I follow her lead, as I always seem to do.
My breath fogs in the evening chill and I jog up the last few steps, anxious to get inside and out of the cold. She holds open the door, waving me in and offers me her cheek as I cross the threshold and into the brightly lit space.
Her cheek is ice cold as I kiss it, and I wonder how long she has been standing outside, waiting for me. “Jillian,” I say in greeting.
"Brant," she says with a resigned sigh, removing her jacket and holding out a hand for mine. “Let's go to the parlor."
The parlor is trademark Jillian—stiff, expensive, and functional. I sit on the edge of a white divan and watch her face as she settles into an upright chair. It is even tighter than normal, her face as pale as the furniture, and the dread in the pit of my stomach grows.
"Layana called me," she says. "She told me what she told you."
I watch as she smooths the front pleats of her charcoal slacks and wait for her to dismiss the idea. Surely, she will dismiss the idea.
"I never wanted you to date that woman, Brant." She sniffs.
Not the words I am expecting. "Is she telling the truth, Jillian?"
She carefully smooths her hands over the top of her hair and pats a few windswept pieces into place. Finally, she looks at me. "You wouldn't even believe me if I told you, Brant. She has you so twisted around her finger. Multiple personalities?" she scoffs. "It's her delusional attempt to explain an affair."
She stands and paces before me, her pointy-toed shoes clicking on the floor like a metronome. "You're the one who suspected her of cheating." She points a trembling finger at me.Trembling. Was it from anger or fear? "You know what's going on here, Brant. She's found someone else and doesn't want to lose you over it."
My relief at her dismissal warred with my opinion of Layana. Jillian was right, I had suspected her, but I also knew that something had to have triggered the affair, there had to be an explanation paired with the betrayal.
