Chapter 8
Samuel
The Sunday drive to his parents’ house was a slow-motion suffocation.
With every mile, the familiar landmarks felt less like nostalgia and more like mile markers leading to a place he couldn’t bring himself to abandon.
The house was a picture of sterile, colonial-era respectability: red brick, white shutters, a manicured lawn that tolerated no weeds.
As Samuel pulled into the driveway, his stomach tightened into a hard, familiar knot.
Inside, the air smelled of lemon polish and slow-cooking roast, a scent forever linked to quiet dread. Polished wood floors gleamed under the stark light of a crystal chandelier. On every wall, a crucifix hung; not as an object of faith, but as a silent, omnipresent sentinel. A reminder. A warning.
He took off his coat, hanging it on the brass rack. His mother appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a floral apron. Her smile was tight.
“Samuel. You’re right on time.”
“Hi, Mom.” His voice felt too small.
His father was already seated at the head of the long, formal dining table, reading the financial section. He didn’t look up.
“Sit,” he said, in lieu of greeting.
Samuel took his usual seat to his father’s right. The chair was too hard. He placed his hands in his lap, forcing them to be still. The silence was thick, broken only by the rustle of newsprint and the distant clatter of dishes.
His mother brought out the roast, placing it ceremoniously in the center. It was dry at the edges. No one commented. His father folded his paper into sharp, precise creases and finally looked at him. The gaze was assessing, like a foreman inspecting machinery.
“So,” he began, the single word loaded. He carved the roast with surgical strokes, the knife scraping against the bone china platter. “Voss Wise. What’s his impression of you? Has he commented on your work?”
A cold sweat broke out at the small of Samuel’s back. Gael’s face, impassive and intense, flashed in his mind. The memory of his own trembling hands in that office kitchen rose up, choking him. “He… he’s given me direct assignments. With tight deadlines. He expects perfection.”
“I should hope so.” His father set his fork down with a soft click. “But that’s not an impression, Samuel. That’s a job description. Has he praised you? Corrected you? Have you given him reason to do either?”
Corrected you.
The words echoed in the hollow space where Samuel’s courage should have been. He saw the glass of water placed before him, heard the quiet, undeniable command. Drink.
His face grew warm with a flush of shame and something else, something traitorous and deeply confusing. “He has… provided direction. He’s exacting.” It was the safest, most sterile truth he could manage.
“Exacting.” His father leaned back, steepling his fingers. The posture was eerily familiar, a mirror of something that sent a jolt of dread through Samuel. “Exacting men have no patience for mediocrity. They can spot weakness the way a hound smells fear. Have you shown him weakness, Samuel?”
Samuel’s breath hitched. He couldn’t control the minute tremor that started in his knee beneath the table.
He felt laid bare, as if his father could see every flinch, every stuttered ‘sir,’ every time his composure had cracked under Gael Wise’s gaze.
He felt a confusing, horrifying fusion of the two men in that moment; both seeing him, both demanding something he couldn’t name.
“I… I’m performing the work to the standard,” he whispered, his voice barely audible.
“Look at me when you speak.”
Samuel’s head jerked up, his eyes meeting his father’s. The man’s gaze was cold, probing, searching for the crack. “The standard is the minimum. I didn’t ask if you were meeting the minimum. I asked if you’ve shown weakness. Has your… sensitivity been a problem?”
Samuel’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, trapped thing. His palms were slick. He was drowning in the scrutiny. “No,” he forced out, the lie brittle. “It hasn’t been a problem.”
His father held his gaze for a long, excruciating moment, then finally looked away, picking up his fork again as if the interrogation was a minor, concluded matter.
“See that it doesn’t. A firm like that will chew you up and spit you out if it smells fear on you. You have to be harder than you are.”
Samuel felt hollowed out, his insides scraped raw. He nodded mutely, his appetite gone, the roast on his plate looking like ash.
Then, his mother spoke, her voice a bright, poisonous birdcall into the silence he was crumbling inside. “I ran into Linda Covington after service today. You remember her daughter, Penny?”
He kept his eyes down, his focus locked on a single, pale pea crushed against his plate as he shook his head.
“Oh, she’s just blossomed into such a lovely young woman,” his mother continued, laying down her fork. “So sweet. So devout. She teaches Sunday school for the toddlers, you know. And beautiful, Samuel. Truly. A classic beauty.”
She reached beside her chair and produced a small, gilt-edged photograph, sliding it across the polished table toward him with the reverence of presenting a holy relic. “I showed her your graduation photo from law school. She was very impressed. Said you looked ‘distinguished.’”
Samuel’s eyes flicked to the image against his will. A young woman with soft-looking brown hair and a gentle, closed-mouth smile, standing before a rose trellis. She looked kind. She looked like everything he was supposed to want.
A fresh wave of nausea rolled through him, sour and insistent.
“Linda says Penny has been asking about you,” his mother pressed, her voice syrupy with implication. “Now that you’re established at such a fine firm… it’s the perfect time. She’s not like those other girls, you know. She has values. She understands commitment.”
Every word was a brick in a wall meant to entomb him.
Samuel’s throat clenched. He could feel his pulse pounding in his ears, a frantic drumbeat of no, no, no.
The thought of sitting across from Penny, making polite conversation, pretending a flicker of interest, it wasn’t just a lie; it was a sacrilege.
It would be using her, this devout, kind stranger, as a shield for his own condemned nature. The sheer dishonesty of it choked him.
“Mom, I…” he started, the words a dry scrape. “The merger review… it’s all-consuming. Mr. Wise has deadlines that…” He grasped for the professional excuse, the one thing that had ever commanded his father’s respect.
“Nonsense,” his mother cut in, her smile unwavering but her eyes hardening.
“Every young man needs balance. You can’t live at the office.
A nice girl like Penny would be good for you.
She’d… ground you.” The pause before ‘ground you’ was microscopic, but Samuel heard the unspoken word clearly: fix you.
His father finally spoke, his tone dry as dust. “Your mother is right. A serious young professional should be considering a serious future. This is how it begins. You’re not getting any younger, Samuel.”
The trap was fully sprung, its jaws polished by feigned concern.
To refuse now would not be seen as a simple lack of interest. It would be a rejection of their values, of the future they had ordained, of the very “grounding” he was presumed to need.
It would drag the terrifying, unspoken question about why into the harsh light of the dining room.
Panic, cold and slick, tightened its grip around his lungs. He saw the crossroads again: the path of the lie, paved with forced smiles and silent self-betrayal, or the path of truth, which led to a cliff’s edge he had been thrown from once before.
He remembered the sound of the van door closing at Restoration Hills. He felt the phantom ache in his knees from the shame chair.
His mother leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper that was somehow worse. “Just call her. Take her for coffee. What’s the harm in a single coffee, Samuel? It would mean so much to me. To Linda.”
What’s the harm?
The harm was in the first step onto a path that demanded he annihilate himself.
The harm was in the look in Penny’s kind eyes when she inevitably realized the man across from her was an empty, fraudulent shell.
The harm was in agreeing, yet again, that who he was must be hidden, poisoned, and denied.
But the fear was older and louder than his shame. It was a primal terror that whispered of expulsion, of his father’s final, icy dismissal, of being utterly alone.
He saw the expectant glimmer in his mother’s eyes, the impatient set of his father’s jaw. The silence stretched, thin and lethal.