Chapter 6 - The Muted Screen
The twelfth night arrived with a torrential coastal storm that rattled the leaded glass panes of the grand library. Outside, the waves crashed violently against the rocky bluffs below the terrace, throwing sheets of white spray high into the darkness.
Nicholas sat slumped in a deep chesterfield armchair of distressed green leather, his legs stretched out before the dark marble hearth. The room was illuminated only by the faint blue wash of a massive eighty-inch television screen mounted flush against the walnut wainscoting across the room.
The audio was completely muted.
On the screen, a local news broadcast was running a special investigative segment. A photograph of Anna—taken two years ago at a charity gala for the Boston Symphony Orchestra—filled the right side of the screen. In the picture, she was radiant, her brunette hair styled in a classic chignon, wearing an understated midnight-blue gown and the diamond earrings Nicholas had purchased to mark their twelfth anniversary. Beside her photograph, the lower third of the screen displayed a bold, urgent banner, but Nicholas had deliberately unfocused his eyes, rendering the words a meaningless, blurred smear of white and red graphics.
He didn't need to read the news ticker to know what the media was speculating.
WIFE OF PROMINENT MARITIME MAGNATE MISSING.SEARCH ALONG RHODE ISLAND COAST ENTERS SECOND WEEK.AUTHORITIES SUSPECT FOUL PLAY IN DISAPPEARANCE OF ANNA WALKER.
They thought she was dead. The police detectives who had visited the gates three days ago had looked at Nicholas with that guarded, calculating skepticism unique to homicide investigators. They looked at his fortune, his reputation, his unyielding demeanor, and they saw a dangerous husband who had disposed of an inconvenient spouse and used his private fleet to dump the evidence fifty miles out on the continental shelf.
Nicholas let out a harsh, bitter sound that was half-laugh, half-groan.
They thought he had killed her. If only they knew the humiliating reality: that Anna had walked out under her own power, taking nothing, leaving him stranded in the wreckage of his own arrogant domesticity.
He looked down at his right hand. He was still clutching the empty mahogany box, his thumb running over the worn velvet interior where her letter had rested for fourteen years.
He was exhausted. His body, usually conditioned to operate on four hours of sleep and high-octane adrenaline, was collapsing under the weight of constant, unresolved vigilance. The skin beneath his eyes was dark, his cheeks hollowed by days of skipped meals. Every time he closed his eyes, he heard the creak of the floorboards in the hallway; every time the wind howled through the chimney, he thought he heard her key turning in the front lock.
He had built this entire kingdom—the companies, the docks, the ships, the political alliances—to prove to the world, and to himself, that he could never be discarded again. He had grown up on the concrete piers of South Boston, watching his father lose everything to bank foreclosures and debt collectors. He had sworn that when he built a house, it would be a vault that no one could breach and nothing could leave.
And yet, Anna had walked through those walls without breaking a single pane of glass.
May you like
The blue light of the television flickered against the dark ceiling, casting long, distorted shadows across the bookshelves. The grandfather clock struck two in the morning, its bronze chime vibrating through the hollow expanse of the room.
Nicholas rested his head against the cold leather of the chair, his eyes fixed on Anna’s smiling, silent face on the muted screen, waiting for an enemy he could not see, fighting a war he had already lost.
