Dare To Love Again

I took her hand in mine and carried my son on the other shoulder as we climbed the steps to the monstrosity of a house that her dad had inherited from his when her grandfather passed a while back. According to what I’ve learned, Ann had thrown the grandmother out the day after Sterling’s death since he’d kept his mother home with him.

Now that I’d met the older woman and had spent some time with her, I’m wondering how she’d allowed that to happen. She doesn’t strike me as the type to be strong-armed by anyone, least of all the woman she hated with such passion. The butler was waiting at the door as if expecting us with a smile for my wife, a stoic greeting for me, and a wistful look for my son. “They’re in the family room down the hall to the left; I’ll show you.”

I didn’t release her hand, and though I knew there was nothing to fear, I couldn’t fight the feeling that something unexpected was in the air. I knew as soon as I saw him and looked down at my wife, who took a second to catch on as she stared. “Daddy?” I barely caught her against my chest as she fainted dead away, and my son started to bawl, probably thinking something was wrong with his mom. “Fuck!”

Sterling Winthrop came across the room, “may I?” He asked before lifting his daughter and walking over to the settee to lay her down. A million different thoughts and emotions ran through my head at once, and I wasn’t sure what the hell to think. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions; I’ll answer them all when she wakes up.”

He spoke to me, but his eyes never left his kid. It was grandma who spoke up next while the others in the room secretly dried their eyes. “I didn’t know!” Gordon exclaimed when I looked at him. “I just found out too.” He wiped his eyes and pounded Sterling’s shoulder playfully while I tried to make sense of it all as grandma drew my attention.

“I’m the only one who knew. It was hell these past twenty-odd years keeping a secret, but there was nothing else we could do. Now you understand why I couldn’t have her charged with murder. After Sterling tells his side of things, then we can go to the police and have her charged with the correct crime.”

The old woman sagged in her chair as if the weight she’d carried for so long had finally made its mark. I can’t even wrap my head around what the hell her life has been like these last two decades. I walked over and sat down beside my wife, who was making noises of awakening after one of the servants had been dispatched to bring something to help wake her up. I thought that shit only worked in the movies, but hell.

Her eyes flew open, and she looked confused. “Calen, I saw… was I dreaming?”

“No, baby, he’s here.” She started to cry, and I wanted to punch her dad in his face. Not the correct response, I know, but it’s a knee jerk response. He made my baby cry.

“Hello, Kyns… I mean, Giselle, first thank you for choosing the name I gave you; it means a lot to me.”

“It’s the only thing I remembered, really. Hearing somewhere that you wanted to name me that, and she chose the other. How I saw, where…” She couldn’t seem to get her thoughts together, but he knew and walked over to take her hand.

“That day, when she shot me, she thought I was dead. I heard everything she said and did to you, but I couldn’t move. When I woke up in the morgue, which almost gave the poor technician a heart attack, I convinced him to call my mother. I was lucky enough that he obeyed and didn’t alert anyone else. He had integrity, thank heavens, and I didn’t end up on some social media platform as the man who came back from the dead.”

“That’s why that technician is now a doctor who never had to pay for anything in his life,” Grandma interjected, which I took to mean that she’s paid for his silence. “But that can’t be; I saw you, saw all that blood…” She shook as if reliving the moment.

“Your father is a hemophiliac, which worked in his favor that day. The amount of blood caused your… caused Ann to believe him dead, but he could’ve also bled out, so we got lucky there. In the end, it was little more than a flesh wound; the bullet barely grazed his head.”

Giselle looked at me with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Didn’t she say she cremated him?”

“About that, the man who was cremated was someone was an old vagrant who had no one to claim his remains. I guess we’ll have to have hiss records taken care of.” Her grandmother answered all of her questions.