Chapter 16
Brooklyn Sloane
Brook stood outside Gwenyth’s door for a moment before raising her hand to knock.
The second-floor hallway was narrow and dim.
The carpet was worn thin along the center, the path made from decades of footsteps tracing the same route between the bedroom and the staircase.
Several framed photographs hung along the wall, though the glass was too smudged for Brook to make out the images from where she stood.
She knocked. Three soft, measured strikes.
No answer.
She waited a full thirty seconds, listening for movement on the other side. Nothing. No footsteps, no creak of furniture, no indication that anyone was aware of her presence. The corridor was so quiet that she could hear her own breathing and the faint tick of the clock from the floor below.
She knocked again, harder this time.
“Gwenyth, it’s Brook Sloane. I need to speak with you.”
The force of the second knock pushed the door inward. It hadn’t been latched, and it swung open in a slow arc that revealed the room beyond.
Gwenyth was sitting in a high-backed chair by the window, her legs drawn beneath her and the gray cardigan wrapped around her frame like a second skin. She was facing the greenhouse, her gaze rather distant. She didn’t turn when Brook entered.
The room was smaller than she had expected for a private suite in a house this size.
A single bed with a white coverlet, neatly made, the pillows arranged in such a way that suggested routine rather than care.
A dresser against the far wall held a framed photograph of a man and woman standing in front of the greenhouse.
The man was tall and thin with dark hair, and the woman beside him was smiling in a way that transformed her entire face.
Nestor and Claudine.
Taken at a time before grief had claimed this family and refused to let go.
A narrow bookshelf beside the bed held a row of leather-bound volumes that Brook recognized as botanical books, their spines cracked and softened from years of handling.
On the windowsill, a collection of small ceramic pots held dried seedlings, their stems brittle and brown, relics of a girl who had once been given living things to tend by a man who wanted to teach her that patience could produce something beautiful.
Now all that remained were remnants of death.
Brook’s gaze moved to the nightstand.
A glass of water sat beside a small ceramic dish. In it were several loose pills, different shapes and sizes, none in a bottle, none labeled. Just pills, resting in plain sight, the way mints might sit in a bowl on a receptionist's desk. Ordinary and unexplained.
Brook cataloged the detail without letting her attention linger.
No prescription bottle meant no label. No label meant no way to identify what Gwenyth was taking, or who had provided it, without having the pills analyzed.
Brook would need to come back for a sample, or ask Bit to arrange for one, but not now. Not during this conversation.
She pulled over the only other chair in the room, a wooden straight-back from beside the dresser, and positioned it near Gwenyth without crowding her. The legs scraped softly against the hardwood, and Gwenyth’s head turned a fraction at the sound before settling back toward the window.
Brook sat down and rested her hands in her lap.
“Gwenyth, I have something to tell you, and I wanted you to hear it from me rather than from anyone else.”
Gwenyth rested her bare feet on the floor and laced her fingers together over the fabric of the cardigan. She didn’t turn from the window, but her breathing changed, the rhythm slowing in the way it does when a body braces for something it already senses is coming.
“Porter was in an accident this afternoon,” Brook said as gently as she could. “His truck was found on County Road Nine. I’m very sorry, Gwenyth. He didn’t survive.”
The room seemed to hold its breath.
Gwenyth didn’t cry. She didn’t make a sound.
Her hands tightened in her lap, her knuckles whitening against the gray knit, and her chin dipped forward by the smallest degree.
The stillness that settled over her wasn’t the blankness Brook had encountered on the staircase that morning.
It was something else entirely. This was a woman who had heard the words, understood them completely, and arrived at a place beyond the reach of tears.
Brook didn't fill the silence. She sat beside Gwenyth and let it be, because some grief was too deep for words, and the kindest thing she could offer was the simple act of being present.
The afternoon light through the window shifted as a cloud moved across the sun, dimming the room and then brightening it again.
Beyond the glass, birds called to one another from the tree line, their songs faint and unhurried, carrying across the grounds the way sounds did when the world outside didn't know that something inside had broken.
“He was the only one who never wanted anything from me,” Gwenyth said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Her words carried a simple truth that had probably never been spoken aloud.
Porter had stayed on this estate for decades.
He had maintained the grounds in his early years, stocked the kitchen in his later years, but had also kept watch over a woman the rest of the world had forgotten.
And he had done it without asking for anything in return, without leveraging her vulnerability, without using his proximity to serve an agenda.
He had simply stayed…for her.
“I could tell that he cared about you very much.”
Gwenyth’s fingers loosened in her lap, and she pressed one hand flat against the arm of the chair as though steadying herself against something only she could feel.
“Was it an accident?”
“We don’t know yet,” Brook said truthfully, not wanting to mislead her. “We’re investigating.”
Gwenyth accepted this with a single, almost imperceptible nod. She didn’t ask follow-up questions. She didn’t demand details or explanations. She absorbed the information the way she absorbed most things, by drawing it inward and holding it somewhere deep enough that the surface barely rippled.
Brook let another moment pass before she spoke again. She kept her voice gentle, unhurried, as though the question were an afterthought rather than something she’d been carrying since that morning.
“Gwenyth, earlier, you mentioned your father’s lab. You said his equipment was there. Can you tell me where the lab is exactly?”
Gwenyth’s fingers began to move across the arm of the chair in slow, absent strokes as she caressed the grain of the wood.
“He loved the greenhouse.”
The greenhouse again. Gwenyth had given the same answer she’d given on the staircase earlier. Brook had already walked that space, already ascertained the bare worktables and empty shelves. Whatever Gwenyth was pointing her toward wasn’t inside the greenhouse. It had to be beneath it.
Brook didn’t press anymore.
Gwenyth had given her the same answer twice, and pushing for specifics risked shutting the door that had just cracked open. The greenhouse was a place Brook could return to and search for an access point without needing permission or further explanation.
“Thank you, Gwenyth.” Brook gave her another minute before speaking again. “Your uncle is on his way. He wants to see you.”
“He wants the house.”
The correction was delivered without bitterness, without anger. It was simply a fact, stated by a woman who had spent decades listening to the difference between what people said and what they meant. Brook didn’t contradict her. She couldn’t.
“Is there anything I can get for you before I go downstairs? Water, or something to eat?”
Gwenyth shook her head in response. Her gaze had returned to the window, to the grounds beyond…
to the greenhouse. The light through the glass fell across her profile, catching the sharp line of her jaw and the dark hair that hung past her shoulders.
Brook wondered how many hours of Gwenyth’s life had been spent in this very chair, in this same position, facing the glass structure where her father had worked and died and been buried without her knowing.
Or perhaps with her knowing, in some way that defied explanation.
Brook stood from the chair and returned it to its place beside the dresser.
She moved toward the door, already composing the next steps in her mind.
The pills in the dish. The crash investigation.
The greenhouse that Gwenyth kept pointing her toward.
The man who came at night. Every thread leading somewhere Brook couldn’t yet follow.
She was nearly through the doorway when Gwenyth’s voice reached her from across the room. Quiet. Almost inaudible. As though the words were meant less for Brook and more for the walls around them.
“The house is emptier now. Soon it will just be me and the ones who come at night.”
Brook’s hand stilled on the doorframe. She turned back, but Gwenyth hadn’t moved. She was exactly where Brook had found her, sitting in the high-backed chair, facing the window, wrapped in gray, her reflection a pale ghost in the glass.
Brook stepped into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind her. She stood there for a moment, her hand still on the knob, mulling over Gwenyth’s parting words.
The ones who come at night.