Chapter One #2
“Six months before her accident. Hannah… someone leaked it to TMZ this morning. It’s everywhere.”
I couldn’t stop watching the video. Something that had been going on while I’d thought I knew him.
“There’s more,” Juliette said quietly. “Hotel receipts. Someone’s been feeding the press for days.”
The video looped. James’s hand on her waist. His mouth near her ear. Her laugh. And there he was again, alive again, dying again every time the footage restarted.
“Hannah? Say something.”
I handed the phone back to her. My hands were steady. Pierce women don’t shake where people can see.
“I need to call my parents.”
The Pierce estate looked like something out of a magazine—because it had been in dozens of them. My mother had spent thirty years perfecting every detail, from the imported Italian marble to the roses that bloomed in exactly the right shade of cream.
I’d grown up here, but it had never felt like home.
The study smelled like leather and cigars and old money. My father sat behind his desk, looking like a man who’d just watched his stock portfolio tank. My mother stood by the window, her back rigid, her face arranged in the expression she wore when photographers were present.
There were six people in the room—four of them strangers. Lawyers, probably. Or PR consultants. With my family, it was hard to tell the difference.
“The narrative is simple,” one of them was saying as I walked in. “James was vulnerable after your grandmother’s death. Mrs. Tucker saw an opportunity to attach herself to a prominent family. He was seduced. Manipulated.”
My mother nodded. “That’s consistent with what we’ve always known about his judgment.”
“We’ll need to coordinate with friendly media outlets. Get ahead of the story before the Tucker camp can spin it.”
I stood in the doorway, watching them reduce my brother to a convenient fiction. James the victim. James the naive young man led astray by a predatory older woman.
Never mind that Felicia Tucker had been two years younger than him. Never mind that James had never been naive about anything in his life.
“You’re going to create a false story,” I said.
Every head in the room turned toward me.
“Hannah.” My father’s voice carried that familiar warning tone. “This is a delicate situation. We need to protect the family’s interests.”
“He’s dead,” I said. “He’s been dead for a year. And you’re still trying to control his story.”
“His story is our story.” My mother crossed the room, her heels clicking on the marble. “Everything he did reflects on this family. Your father’s company. On our reputation.”
“Our reputation,” I repeated. “Of course.”
“You’re upset. I understand. This is difficult for all of us.” She reached for my hand, and her fingers were cold. “But we need to present a united front. The Tuckers will try to make James into a villain. We cannot allow that.”
I looked at the room full of strangers in expensive suits, at my parents with their careful masks, at the portrait of James that hung above the fireplace. He was smiling in it, that charming smile that got him out of everything.
I thought about all the times he’d told me that nothing in this family was real. That love was just another word for leverage.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Hannah, we’re not finished discussing this.”
“I am.”
I walked out before anyone could stop me.
That night, I sat on my bedroom floor with a glass of wine and a photograph of James.
It was from two Christmases ago, the last one before he died.
He was wearing a ridiculous sweater covered in sequined reindeer, something he’d bought specifically to annoy our mother.
I’d taken the picture right after she’d made a comment about it, and he was laughing so hard his eyes were squeezed shut.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I asked the photograph. “Of all the women in the world, you picked someone else’s wife?”
Silence.
“Did you love her? Or did you just love knowing you could take something that belonged to someone else?”
The James in the photograph kept laughing.
I drank my wine and scrolled through my phone because I was a masochist, apparently. The coverage had multiplied like a virus. Every outlet had the story. Every headline was worse than the last.
Then I stopped.
A tabloid had published a photograph of Simon Tucker leaving his lawyer’s office. I’d seen pictures of him before, in passing, in the society pages my mother insisted I read. But I’d never really looked.
I looked now.
Dark hair, cut short. Shoulders that filled out his suit jacket like it had been sewn onto his body. He wasn’t smiling in the photograph. His expression was closed off, guarded. But there was something in his eyes that made me stop scrolling. Something raw beneath all that control.
He looked like a man who’d had everything he believed in ripped away from him.
I knew that look. I saw it in my mirror every morning.
The article mentioned his daughter. Suzy, five years old. There were no photographs of her. Even the tabloids hadn’t managed to get their cameras on her, and I found myself grateful for that small mercy.
But they were speculating, whispers about timing. Questions about paternity. The vultures circled, waiting for blood.
I scrolled further, scanning the timeline the tabloids had so helpfully constructed. Felicia Tucker died in a car accident in March. James died two months later.
Two months.
I set the phone down and picked up the photograph again. James’s laughing face blurred as my eyes filled with tears I refused to let fall.
“That’s why, isn’t it?” My voice came out rough. Broken. “That’s why you did it.”
All those months of wondering. All those sleepless nights asking myself what I’d missed, what I could have done, why my brother would swallow a handful of pills and wash them down with whiskey. I’d tortured myself with questions that had no answers.
Now I had one. And it was worse than not knowing.
“You loved her enough to destroy a family.”
I hurled the photograph across the room. It hit the wall and clattered to the floor, the glass cracking down the middle of James’s face.
“What about me?” I was shouting now, and I didn’t care. “Did you even think about me? About what it would do to me to find you like that? To bury you? To be left alone in this family with no one?”
The photograph didn’t answer. James kept laughing behind the fractured glass, frozen in a moment when he was still alive, still reckless, still mine.
“You chose her.” I pressed my hand to my mouth, trying to hold in the sob that was clawing up my throat. “You chose a dead woman over your own sister. You left me here to sift through your ashes, and you didn’t even have the decency to tell me why.”
I sat there on my bedroom floor, surrounded by the wreckage of everything I thought I knew about my brother, and I cried.
When I finally stopped, the wine bottle was empty.
I picked up my phone and looked at Simon Tucker’s photograph one more time. At the rage simmering beneath the surface.
My brother had destroyed this man’s life. And then he’d destroyed himself rather than face what he’d done.
I stared at that photograph for a long time.
And for reasons I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t look away.
Continue Reading in Sealed by Cassidy Vale