“She’s going to kill us,” Ethan whispered, his focus shifting from me to the woman outside, the woman he had feared more than he had ever loved me.
“She can’t kill what she doesn’t own,” I said, gathering my things. “And since you don’t own this house, you, her, and your ’empire’ are going to have to find somewhere else to stage your next act…”I walked toward the foyer, the heels of my shoes clicking against the stone floor with a sound that felt like liberation. Ethan didn’t try to stop me. He couldn’t. He was a man who had traded his integrity for a seat at his mother’s table, and now, the table had been pulled out from under him.
I opened the front door just enough to see Linda standing there, her red purse clutched in her hand like a shield. She looked at me, her eyes burning with an impotent, scorching rage.
“You think you’ve won?” she hissed, her voice trembling. “You’re nothing without us.”
I looked at the woman who had spent years trying to erase my existence, and I felt nothing. No malice, no bitterness, not even the desire for revenge. Just a deep, profound sense of relief that the performance was finally over.
“I’m not without you, Linda,” I said, pulling the door shut until it clicked with a finality that echoed through the empty hallway. “I’m without the version of myself that let you define me. And that is a victory you’ll never be able to dismantle.”
I walked to the garage, started the car I had purchased with my own money—money they never knew I had—and drove away. I didn’t look back at the grand mansion in Beverly Hills. I didn’t look back at the woman screaming at the locked door, or the man staring at the ceiling in the kitchen. I drove toward the horizon, leaving behind the wreckage of a lie, and finally, for the first time in years, I started to breathe.
