“Don’t start.”
“Call an ambulance.”
“We will.”
“When?”
His expression hardened.
“When Mother finds what she needs.”
And that was the moment I understood something I should have understood years earlier.
My husband was not standing between me and the monster.
He was standing beside her.
I had inherited Bellweather House eight months before the fall.
Calling it a house barely did it justice.
The estate sat on twenty-three wooded acres beside Lake Cardinal, two hours north of the city.
My grandfather, Everett Mercer, had bought the original farmhouse in 1979 and spent four decades transforming it into a sprawling stone-and-timber retreat with twelve bedrooms, a library, a glass conservatory, a boathouse, a private dock, and gardens that had appeared in architecture magazines.
The property was valued at a little over five million dollars.
But to me, it had never been worth five million.
It was worth summer mornings eating peaches on the back steps.
