Chapter 7 - The Sunday Paper
I slept for fourteen hours.
It wasn't the fitful, twitching sleep of the last seven weeks, where every breath was calculated to avoid rolling onto my right acromion. The flannel sheets were heavy, smelling of mountain sun and cedar shavings, and Mrs. Mercer had wedged three long buckwheat pillows behind my back so that even if my hips tried to turn, my shoulder remained suspended in a soft, immovable trough.
When I opened my eyes, the light coming through the small rectangular windows was not the harsh, filtered gray of suburban Richmond. It was the high, clean gold of an October morning in the Piedmont, broken into geometric lozenges by the bare branches of an ancient sugar maple outside the glass.
The house was quiet, but it wasn't empty.
From somewhere down the hallway came the low, rhythmic thump-hiss of a cast-iron skillet hitting a gas flame, accompanied by the smell of scorched cornmeal and cured salt pork.
I sat up slowly. The immobilizer was still tight, holding my forearm flat against my diaphragm, but the dull, nauseating heat in the center of the joint had faded into a manageable ache—the kind of pain you can name and put in a box.
My phone was sitting on the pine nightstand beside the bed.
It was plugged into a white charger cable that hadn't been there when I went to sleep. A small yellow sticky note was pressed against the glass, written in Ryan's heavy, angular draftsmanship:
Battery was dead. I turned the ringer off. Take two of the white pills with the tea my mother left on the stove before you open the messages.
I didn't take the pills. I reached out with my left hand and tapped the screen.
The notifications didn't roll down; they cascaded like an avalanche from a gravel hopper.
Forty-eight missed calls from Elaine Cole.
Twenty-two missed calls from Richard Cole (Office).
Sixteen missed calls from Paige.
One hundred and fourteen text messages.
I didn't open Paige’s thread. I knew the cadence of her panic; it would start with furious accusations of sabotage, slide into hysterical appeals about her reputation, and terminate in a flat, venomous threat about what our father was going to do to my health insurance through the county school board.
I opened Natalie’s thread instead.
My cousin had sent three links and a thirty-second video file at 11:14 PM the night before.
The video had been recorded from the terrace stairs of Willow Creek Estate, looking down into the sunken garden. The lighting was poor—the amber glow of the lanterns competing with the high-intensity flashes of the catering cleanup crew—but the audio was crisp as dry kindling.
In the center of the frame stood my mother, her eighty-gauge raw silk sheath stained down the right thigh with what looked like red punch, screaming into the face of Councilman Pierce’s wife.
"...a deliberate, malicious intervention!" Elaine’s voice was ragged, stripping the veneer off her voice until she sounded like her grandfather who had run a dry-cleaning plant in Lynchburg. "She threw herself into that basin! She has been jealous of Paige since the day she was born! Ask anyone in Henrico County! She has always been morbid!"
Beside her, Paige was sitting on an upturned wooden champagne crate, her four-thousand-dollar gown bunched between her knees like an old laundry sack, her bare feet tucked into Dennis’s discarded loafers. She wasn't crying anymore. She was staring into her phone, her thumbs flying across the glass with terrifying speed, while Brooke Ellison tried to pin a fresh gardenia into hair that looked like a bird had nested in the chignon.
The third link Natalie sent was a screenshot from the Richmond Times-Dispatch social register, updated at six o'clock that morning.
A simple, three-line retraction under the society notices:
The marriage of Miss Paige Alexandra Cole to Mr. Ryan Thomas Mercer, scheduled for Saturday, September twenty-eighth at Willow Creek Estate, will not take place. The Cole family requests privacy at this time.
Beneath the notice, someone had added an editorial note that had clearly bypassed my father’s friends on the copy desk:
Following an incident requiring emergency medical intervention on the estate grounds, the groom departed the venue accompanied by the bride’s elder sister, Miss Marissa Cole. Henrico County Emergency Services confirmed an ambulance dispatch was requested by guests but later canceled by private transport to the University of Virginia Medical Center.
I lowered the phone.
The bedroom door creaked open three inches. A large, black snout with gray whiskers pushed through the gap, followed by two amber eyes set into a skull the size of a pumpkin.
"Bear," a voice called softly from the hall. "Get your nose out of the girl's blankets."
Ryan’s mother walked in, carrying a blue stoneware mug that had steam curling off the lip in a thin, fragrant spiral. She wore an old gray woolen cardigan over her denim shirt, her spectacles pushed up into her silver hair.
"You're awake," she said, setting the mug on the nightstand and picking up the empty water glass from the night before. "Drink that. It’s wild ginger and dried blackberry leaf. Tastes like ditch water, but it’ll keep your gut from turning over from those hospital narcotics."
"Thank you, Mrs. Mercer," I said, my voice hoarse from the sleep and the pool chlorine.
"Call me Clara," she said, sitting on the corner of the mattress with the heavy, unhurried ease of a woman who has spent fifty years watching people try to rush things that take six months to grow. "My boy is out in the machine shed. He’s had three different lawyers from Richmond idling at the mailbox since seven this morning."
My ribs tightened. "My father?"
"Your father sent two boys in gray suits with an injunction," Clara said, her mouth twitching with that same dry, mountain humor Ryan had used on the highway. "Something about 'interference with a contractual marital agreement' and 'unlawful possession of family property.' Ryan didn't even come out of the barn. He sent the big hound down to the gate with his breakfast bowl, and those two Richmond boys wouldn't even roll their windows down to hand the papers over the cattle guard."
"Clara," I said, leaning forward until the wool blanket fell away from my good shoulder. "He can't stay here. Ryan has his name on the building on Main Street. He has thirty people working for him. Richard will—"
"Richard Cole is an old blowhard who hasn't tried a case in fifteen years," Clara interrupted, her hand coming down on my knee through the flannel with enough force to settle the matter permanently. "My brother is the Chief of Police in Goochland, and my second cousin is the Commonwealth’s Attorney for the entire judicial district. If Richard Cole wants to bring his city deputies out to this ridge to harass an injured schoolteacher and a boy who spent three hundred thousand dollars of his own money keeping the Hanover treatment plant from leaking into the water supply, he’d better bring more than an injunction."
May you like
She rose, smoothed her cardigan down, and walked to the door.
"Wash your face," she added over her shoulder. "There’s buckwheat cakes on the griddle, and Ryan needs someone to tell him how much lime to put on the clover patch before the rain starts at noon."
