Chapter 10 - The Woman Who Came Back
Grandma Eleanor stopped right in front of me, reached out with her cold, arthritic hands, and gently pulled my trembling fingers out of my coat pocket. She took the smooth river stone from my palm and tucked it away into her own bag.
“You did well, Khloe,” she said softly, her voice carrying easily over the whine of the retreating helicopter blades.
Tears finally broke free, streaming hot down my freezing cheeks. I threw my arms around her frail shoulders and buried my face in her coat, sobbing the last three years of misery, betrayal, and terror out of my system.
“You heard the call,” I whispered against her collar.
“I never hung up,” Eleanor replied, a fierce, proud smile touching her lips. “When you called me from that cabin, I called the State Police barracks in Scranton. I told them my granddaughter was being hunted by wolves in the Poconos. And the Whitcomb family always protects its own.”
Across the clearing, Julian Sterling was hauled to his feet by two troopers, his expensive designer clothes ruined by mud, his face a mask of utter disbelief and ruin. As they pushed him toward the flashing red and blue lights of the cruiser waiting by the cabin, he looked over his shoulder at me.
He didn't look angry anymore. He looked terrified.
Victoria was cuffed and led away moments later, her corporate empire collapsing into dust before the night was even over.
An hour later, sitting in the warm cabin of a state police cruiser with a heavy wool blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a cup of black coffee between my hands, I looked out the frosted window.
The storm was finally starting to clear, breaking open into a cold, starry November sky.
The police officers were packing up their gear. Julian and Victoria were already miles away down the mountain road, heading toward a jail cell where no amount of family money or corporate mergers could bail them out.
Grandma Eleanor sat in the passenger seat beside me, her eyes fixed on the dark road ahead as we began the long drive back to Briar Glen.
I looked down at my left hand.
Slowly, deliberately, I pulled the diamond engagement ring off my finger—the ring that had cost me three years of my life—and dropped it into the center console cup holder like a piece of worthless glass.
I didn't feel broken. I didn't feel lost.
As the car wound its way down out of the mountains toward the safety of the old farmhouse behind the apple orchard, I realized something profound.
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The woman who had left Ardmore yesterday was gone.
And the woman coming back was finally, fiercely, undeniably my own.
