Chapter 9 - The Ashes of Their Kingdom
A month later,
the house was sold.
I didn't want the money.
I donated every cent of the proceeds to a foundation for breast cancer survivors who were in abusive situations.
I wanted that house to be scrubbed of their presence.
I wanted it to belong to people who knew the value of a home,
not a stage.
Miriam’s trial was short and brutal.
With the diary and the forensic audit,
there was no defense.
She was sentenced to five years in prison.
The images of her in a jumpsuit,
without her expensive hats or her jewelry,
filled the local tabloids.
She looked old.
She looked mean.
She looked exactly like the woman she had always been on the inside.
Garrick disappeared.
Some said he moved to another state to try to start over.
Others said he was working a minimum-wage job in a warehouse,
the very kind of work he used to mock.
I didn't go looking for him.
He was a ghost,
and I was done living in a haunted house.
I moved to a small cottage by the coast,
far away from the Texas heat and the suburban gossip.
I spent my days walking on the beach,
the salt air healing my lungs and the sound of the waves quieting my mind.
My hair grew back thick and dark.
My scars faded into silver lines,
reminders of a battle I had won twice.
Once against the cancer.
And once against the people who tried to use it to break me.
Ethan visited every weekend.
We didn't talk about the past.
We talked about the future.
We talked about the books we were reading,
the places we wanted to travel,
and the life we were building as a family.
"You look different,"
he said one evening as we watched the sunset.
"I feel different,"
I replied.
"I feel like I finally inhabit my own body."
"Not as a patient,
not as a wife,
but as a person."
"You were always that person,
Elena,"
Ethan said.
"You just had to fight your way out from under their shadows."
I looked at the horizon,
where the orange of the sun met the deep blue of the water.
I wasn't afraid of the dark anymore.
I knew that I carried my own light.
And I knew that if anyone ever tried to blow it out again,
May you like
I wouldn't just sit in the dark.
I would burn the whole world down to keep the flame alive.
