Chapter 39 - The Gathering of Scars
I drove south through the Carolinas with the windows down, the hot, sweet scent of pine sap slowly giving way to the briny, humid breath of the Atlantic coast.
The cottage on Pawleys Island sat at the end of a sandy lane choked with oleander and wax myrtle. It was small, weathered gray by eighty years of hurricane winds and salt spray, with a wide screened porch that looked out over the endless green expanse of the spartina grass.
On the kitchen counter, when I unlocked the front door, sat a clean, empty glass and an old brass kettle.
No ghost of Eleanor demanding perfection. No whisper of Claire’s mocking laughter. No shadow of Arthur’s calculated, chess-player silence.
For the first time since the night Claire’s bumper had smashed through my driver’s side door, my ribs didn't ache when I took a deep breath. The scar tissue along my collarbone, the ragged white line where the surgeons had pinned the bone together with titanium screws, felt cool beneath my shirt.
I walked out onto the dock that stretched into the marsh creek. The tide was running out, the water swirling dark and amber like tea around the pilings. In the distance, across the narrow barrier island, the steady, rhythmic roar of the Atlantic surf broke against the sandbars—the same sound I had heard over the telephone in the kitchen at Black Oak.
I took the Starbucks paper cup—the one I had kept in the glove box for eight months, crushed and stained, the token Eleanor had brought to my hospital bed as an insult and a bribe—and set it on the wooden railing.
I took out a box of matches, struck one against the sulfur strip, and touched it to the rim.
The thin cardboard caught instantly, the green logo of the mermaid curling into black ash, drifting away on the salt breeze toward the open sea. I watched it burn until there was nothing left but a smudge of gray carbon on the weathered cypress rail, which the incoming sea spray immediately washed away into the tide.
May you like
I stood there for a long time, watching the pelicans dive into the breakers, until the sun dipped behind the mainland pines, painting the salt marsh in hues of copper, amber, and gold.
I was finally free. The Holloway name was dead, the land was safe, and the monsters who had raised me were locked behind steel bars.
