Chapter 23 – Finn - Ghosts That Don’t Stay Buried
The machines make a fucking liturgy out of the room, steady beeps, soft whoosh of ventilators, the little pings like someone dropping a spoon against porcelain.
I stand in the doorway and watch the man who used to tower over every room in this house reduced to tubes and a hospital gown.
Dad looks small, like someone left a great statue in a rainstorm and now all the gold leaf has flaked away.
Mortality is such a violent little thief. Just machines pretending to hold you together while the rest of you unthreads. I want to smash something. Preferably something expensive.
Dad’s eyelids flutter. His mouth works around words he doesn’t have the strength to form yet. He finds me anyway. “You’re still here,” he whispers, and there’s a softness in that sentence that almost makes me sick.
“Didn’t exactly give me a choice, did you?” I answer flat. It’s devoid of flourishing or blubbering sentimentality. The truth is, I would have come sooner if I thought theatrics might save him. But theatrics aren’t my currency. I trade in outcomes.
He laughs, weak, a cough in the middle of it. “Family has a way of doing that.”
Saying family like it’s a commodity, like a trademark.
We are all so noble when someone else is breathing with machines.
He reaches out with one gnarled hand that used to point orders and open doors and knock heads together.
I sit on the edge of the bed because chairs feel like compromises.
His fingers close around mine, a squeeze that belongs to decades of breakfasts, boardroom walk-throughs, long silences at the head of holiday tables.
“Look after them… even if you hate it.” He says it like a favor, like a last small indulgence.
My jaw locks. I look at his hand, at the soft skin, the veiny maps I carved into my mind as a child. Inside I say what I always say now: I’ll look after her. Not the way you mean. Not the way you’d want.
There’s the hospital smell, the sanitary, medicinal smell everyone thinks is neutral and comforting. It’s not comforting. It’s the smell of things being stitched and taped and papered over. It’s the smell of avoidance.
Dad drifts back to sleep. I watch him breathe and count the spaces between heartbeats like a man taking inventory. This is a night I will not forget because forgetting here would be a kind of mercy and mercy is not in my wheelhouse.
I stand, go to the window just to have a wall between me and the bed.
My phone buzzes with a dozen messages, Eric needing an update, Scarlett asking if I'm still alive, an investor wanting a morning call. All of it is noise. The only thing that matters is the hairline fracture of a secret I’ve been circling for years.
I step out of the room and lean my shoulder against the cold paint. The hospital is quieter down here; people sleep in chairs like the living are ghosts too. I breathe once, make my decision, and then pull up the contact I use for things that shouldn’t exist but do.
Dialing the number is like dialing for an arsonist and asking for sparklers. My finger hovers, then presses.
“Wagner,” a voice says on the other end, clipped and professional. Derek.
“I need everything you can find on Eleanor Wagner.” My voice is low, clipped. I don’t bother with pleasantries; those are for boardrooms and coffin speeches. “The gallery she worked at. The year before my mother died. No detail too small.”
Silence, the kind that buzzes when people measure risk. “That’s… old, Finn. Messy.” The man’s voice is careful because he knows the edges of dives like this.
“Find me the mess.” I say it like I’m ordering a steak. No tenderness. No marinade.
He hesitates. “That’s personal. That’s—”
“—exactly why you’ll be paid.” My tone hardens. I’m not negotiating. I’m carving a path. “You find it, you bring it to me.”
There’s a sound, a dark little chuckle. “Are you certain that’s really what you want, Finn? Those are some long-buried bodies. Truth has thorny edges. Cuts both ways.”
“Truth is a tool,” I say. “And I can handle a knife.”
We both know the knife might cut. We both know truth might eat me when it gets ready. But the thing about being hungry is you stop listening to the risks. You start listening to what will fill you.
“Alright,” Derek says finally. “I’ll pull what I can. But this? This could ruffle a lot of feathers. People die over this sort of thing.”
“If people die,” I say, “they did before I knew, and I didn’t give them permission.” I hang up without another word because the slow part is done: the instruction is out into the world.
My hands are still. My mind, a different animal, is not.
There’s a rhythm that governs what I do.
When I want something, I map it, find the weak points, and press until the structure gives.
Eleanor has always been the kind of woman who thinks her hands were dirt-free because she asked other people to clean for her.
That arrogance will be useful. I picture her face when she realizes someone has been looking in corners she assumed were dark enough to hide mistakes.
I picture the little brittle way she clutches at the things she’s built as if she can glue them back together with her teeth.
Ever since I saw the stills Eric sent, something’s been nagging at me.
Eleanor’s involved in something and I need to find out what it is.
Then there’s Ariane, a swath of contradictions: fear, need, a luminous sort of decency that makes me irrational and dangerous.
She’s sitting in that waiting room with her hands folded like a saint holding a secret.
I think of the way she looks at Dad, the mix of duty and something softer.
I think of the way she looks at me sometimes when she thinks I’m not watching…
like a person recognizing a weather pattern in the sky and not knowing if she should run or stay.
I’m not sentimental about her. I’m not “in love” the way the movies sell it.
If anything, it’s worse, an obsession that tastes like adrenaline and the idea of ownership.
It’s ugly and holy at the same time. I would burn the world to make an unsullied patch where she could choose me without her hands shaking from fear or habit.
Derek texts: Got a lead. Gallery records, the assistant’s name… old address. Want me to dig?
I type back: Do it. Get anything on who she associated with. Who paid. Who owed her. Don’t waste time on gossip. My thumbs are chopping the words like wood.
I stand there in the corridor and watch the door I just left. Dad looks so small on that bed, it’s not fair. If he opens his eyes and tells me I was a good son, I’ll gag on the lie and smile.
Outside, the world moves. Hospital staff trade condolences and coffee. Someone cries quietly in a chair with their head in a sweater. It’s all ordinary grief and small mercies.
I put the phone in my pocket and slide my hands into my pockets like a man tucking weapons away. There’s a terrible humor in how tidy this is, the way I can reduce lives to checklists. Funny, in a black way. I hate that I can’t be soft. I don’t want to be. Softness gets you broken.
I walk back into Dad’s room because I promised him, silently, that I’d do what he asked. I sit on the edge of the bed and watch the man who built our house sleep in the glow of machines. I hold his hand... brief and respectful, a touch that says I am here and I will do the thing no one else will.
When I step out into the hallway again, my path is a straight line. The world is a set of problems and now Eleanor is a problem waiting to be solved. And I am a man who likes solutions.
I’m not sure what I’ll do with the truth when it’s in my hands.
Maybe I’ll put it in a velvet box and present it on a silver tray or I’ll light it on fire and watch the smoke follow her like a bad perfume.
God, what if this is all just a misunderstanding?
A part of me hopes it is. Even though I’m not particularly fond of Eleanor, I don’t hate her either.
And Dad? God, he’s obsessed with the woman.
What if she really is into something shady and this is what finally breaks him?
For now, I focus on what’s important. Investigators in motion, the lead thread pulled. For now, I breathe shallow and keep my eyes open.
I dial another number, a private line used to pull truths out of things that think they’re secrets. The circle widens. The search starts.
When someone asks me later if there was a moment everything changed, I’ll tell them it’s complicated. The truth is simpler: nothing ever stays buried if you’re willing to dig. And I am willing.
###
The night is sharp, cutting straight through my jacket like it has a vendetta. I pace the edge of the parking lot, boots grinding gravel. My reflection in the glass doors is blurred and distorted. My jaw is set, eyes cold, and shoulders squared like I’m about to go twelve rounds with a ghost.
I look at that reflection and don’t recognize the man staring back. He looks like a hunter, and I guess he is. Not hunting deer or numbers. Hunting the truth.
Ariane’s face slips into my head without permission.
The way her hand shook earlier, curled so tightly around that Styrofoam cup she nearly crushed it.
Her lips… fuck, those lips. Those lips that I know the taste and feel of—that I know how to render swollen beneath my own, the ones I have now made part for her carnal whines, pouring out the symphony of pleasure only I can give her.
She deserves more than this cage she’s trapped in. More than Eleanor’s strings. She deserves to know what was done and to be free.
And I’ll tear the goddamn world apart to give her that.
My thoughts are interrupted when my phone vibrates in my pocket.
I pull it out and see Eric’s name lighting up the screen.
It’s almost ten, not especially late, but for Eric who’s out cold by eight every night, it’s like midnight.
So, I know immediately: this isn’t a usual call.
“You’re not gonna like this,” Eric says. His tone has that jagged edge, which means he’s been digging somewhere people want him dead for poking.
“I don’t like most things,” I tell him, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Spit it out.”
“Your stepmother,” he says, and already my stomach goes tight. “I found a tie. Name’s Waren. Ring a bell?”
I go still. Waren. That same man at the hospital.
“Drug dealer,” Eric continues.. “Used to supply Elias Vale. That bastard spiraled into an overdose, and Waren was his guy.”
“Fuck,” I mutter, pacing my office like the walls are laughing at me. “And Eleanor?”
“That’s the kicker,” Eric says, his voice dropping low.
“She was in contact with him even after his death. In Rhode Island, when she was still working that waitressing job. That’s how she met Richard in the first place.
She was tied up with Waren before she was Mrs. Wagner.
There’s paper on it… receipts, payments, transfers. Too much smoke for no fire.”
I stop dead, heart punching hard against my ribs. “You’re telling me my father… my father met her after she had been with Waren?”
“I don’t think they were together,” Eric says. “She was close to Waren, but it wasn’t just business. Close. And the timing…”
“Don’t.” My voice is electric and dangerous.
“Finn,” Eric says carefully. “The timing lines up. Year your mother died, Eleanor was in Rhode Island. With Waren. And Richard…”
“No.” The word is iron. “They didn’t. Don’t even fucking suggest it.”
“I’m saying what the record says,” Eric continues. “I don’t think your old man cheated. But Eleanor? She was in the middle of all of it. Too close to Waren. Too close to your father. Too convenient for your mother to end up dead when she did.”
My hand clenches around the phone so hard it could shatter. The silence between us stretches, bitter and ugly.
“Find proof,” I ground out. “Every file, every receipt, every scrap of shit you can dig. If Eleanor breathed near a ledger in Rhode Island, I want it.”
Eric exhales, low. “Careful, Finn. A truth like this doesn’t set anyone free. It burns.”
“Good,” I say. “I like the fire.”
I end the call and put my phone down, taking a deep breath. Before I can stop it, a thought gnaws at me, relentless: if I give Ariane this truth, if I drop it in her lap, and it crushes her, am I any better than Eleanor, the woman I want to see ruined?
Fuck if I know.
My phone buzzes in my hand. One message: Investigation underway. We’ll find something.
Good.
I slide the phone back into my pocket, eyes narrowing.
She thinks she’s safe in this house under her mother’s shadow but safety is the lie that killed my mother.
My gaze hardens, vow etched into me like stone: This time, I’ll burn the lie down. Even if it takes us all with it.