Chapter 29 #2
If you are reading this, it likely means I am dead, or I have simply forgotten where I put this, and you have found it by accident. In either case, the truth has found you sooner or later, and I have no right to ask for mercy for it.
I loved your mother. I loved her badly. Perhaps too much, if such a thing can be called love when it is full of suspicion and pride.
I could not bear to see her speak with any man.
We quarreled after a party because she had spent too much time talking to a certain gentleman.
I accused her. She laughed at me for it.
I was mad with jealousy, and in that rage, I pushed her, and she fell.
By the time I reached the bottom of the stairs, there was blood, and I knew at once what I had done.
I called it an accident for the sake of my cowardice. It was not.
Adam tore his eyes from the letter, and the room tilted around him.
He saw it with terrible clarity all over again, though now the memory had a new center. The stairs. The scream. The blood he had never forgotten. The years he had spent circling the suspicion like a man afraid to touch the truth, because once touched, it could not be put back into shadow.
It had not been mere suspicion. There was nothing left to dispute it anymore.
For a second, his hand tightened on the page until it crumpled. Then, he uncurled his fingers and continued reading.
I thought remarrying might silence the ghosts in this house. It did not. Guilt rotted me. Jealousy stayed with me. I began to see insult and betrayal where there was only kindness. Your stepmother did not deserve the life I gave her, nor the death I have now chosen for her and for myself.
If the carriage has done its work by the time you read this, then know that it was no misfortune of the road. I could not live with what I had made of myself, and I would not leave her to live with it either. That is my final sin and my full confession.
Do not become me, Adam. If you have ever known anger, master it before it mistakes itself for devotion.
Your father.
The clock on the mantelpiece marked the next second with maddening calm. Yet inside the study, the silence felt absolute because the letter had ripped the last veil from a terror Adam had been living inside for years.
He read the lines again, slower this time, as if repetition might somehow make them less monstrous. But there they were. The words were right there, staring at him through his father’s handwriting.
He let the letter fall to his side and stared at the wreckage of the study without seeing any of it.
His father had felt jealousy and followed it into violence, and then felt guilt and caused more death to satisfy it. Every ugly thing in the letter moved outward. His father had been the kind of man to give in to any urge that seized him.
Adam had spent years doing the opposite. It was why he signed up for the army in the first place. So he could master himself and be in control of his feelings all the time.
Now, he could see fully that he had damaged Emily with fear and cowardice. He had let self-denial be cruel enough to hurt her, and he had broken her heart.
God help him, he had done that.
But he had done it because every instinct in him had been hellbent on preventing harm, not unleashing it. He had tortured them both, trying not to become the very man whose confession now shook in his hand.
The thought struck with such force that he had to sit down before his knees gave way.
He dropped into the surviving chair and leaned forward, forearms braced on his thighs, the letter hanging loose between his fingers.
He had feared his anger because he thought anger itself was inherited. The letter said otherwise. His father had not been doomed. He had chosen , again and again, to lean into his violence rather than refuse it.
Adam’s breath came hard and unsteady.
He was not his father.
That realization brought something harsher and far more useful.
Freedom .
The annulment still stood between them, and the damage he had done remained there. Yet, for the first time in years, perhaps for the first time since childhood, Adam could see the shape of his life without that old certainty of doom bending every line of it.
He had been protecting himself from terror so long that in doing so, he had nearly lost her. That was even if he hadn’t already.
He rose so abruptly that the chair legs scraped loudly across the floorboards. The letter shook once in his hand again from urgency. The study remained wrecked around him, but none of it mattered now.
The false calm was gone for good, and in its place stood something he had not allowed himself before—a way forward.
He looked down at the letter one last time, then folded it with rough care and tucked it in his coat pocket.
For years, he had let his father’s ghost make decisions in his name. For years, he had let fear of becoming a violent man dictate his life. He turned toward the door, a new determination settling into him.
That would end.
Today.