Chapter 18 - The Anatomy of a Puppet
"Do not insult my intelligence by calling that love, Gareth," I said, my voice cutting through the sterile room like a scalpel.
"You did not love me."
"Love does not monitor someone’s mileage on their vehicle."
"Love does not systematically isolate a woman from her medical colleagues until she has no friends left to call."
"Love does not calculate the legal expiration date of a dead man's patents and marry his daughter to protect stolen blood money."
Gareth flinched as if I had struck him across the face.
"I did what I was raised to do, Irene!" he cried out, his voice cracking with desperation.
A guard standing near the doorway shifted his hand toward his holster, glaring at Gareth.
Gareth quickly lowered his tone, breathing heavily through his nose.
"You don't understand what it is like growing up in that house," Gareth whispered, his voice trembling.
"Every meal was a performance."
"Every grade in school was evaluated like a quarterly earnings report."
"If I failed, my mother didn't yell at me."
"She simply erased me."
"She would lock my bedroom door from the outside and leave me in the dark for forty-eight hours until I learned to apologize for disappointing the Langston name."
"When I met you at the Columbia Medical gala, you were the first person in my entire life who didn't look at me like an investment portfolio."
"You looked at me like a human being."
"And what did you do with that gift, Gareth?" I asked, cold fury burning behind my eyes.
"You handed the leash directly to Eleanor."
"You let her design our life."
"You bought the house she selected."
"You had me wear the clothes she approved."
"And when Bernard began to see through you, you didn't have the spine to stand up to your mother’s demands for his shipping routes."
"Instead, you went to the medicine cabinet."
"You crushed cardiac beta-blockers into an old man’s decaf coffee because you were too cowardly to tell Eleanor you couldn't close the deal on your own."
Gareth buried his face in his cuffed hands, his shoulders heaving with silent, ragged sobs.
The sight of him did not bring me joy.
It did not heal the six years of psychological erosion I had endured in that cold, marble tomb in Greenwich.
It simply reaffirmed the absolute necessity of my departure.
Gareth was not an evil mastermind.
He was a weak, hollow puppet who had allowed a monster to pull his strings until the wood rotted from the inside out.
"Julian Thorne filed the dismissal of the injunction this morning," Gareth said through his fingers, his voice muffled and broken.
"My mother folded, Irene."
"She called the judge at six a.m."
"The clinic accounts are unfrozen."
"The maritime trust is secure."
"She is going to transfer Arthur Miller’s original laboratory deed and the remaining chemical royalties to your foundation."
"She is doing it to keep you quiet."
I leaned back against the hard plastic chair.
"I don't care why she did it," I said smoothly.
"As long as she did it."
Gareth looked up, his eyes bloodshot, streaks of tears cutting through the gray dust on his cheeks.
"Does that mean... does that mean you won't release the Swiss files?"
"It means," I said, standing up from the metal table, "that I will hold those files for the rest of Eleanor Langston’s life."
"If she ever breathes in my direction again, if Julian Thorne ever steps foot in my county, or if a single dime is withdrawn from my clinic's community trust, the entire world will hear what Richard Langston did to my father."
"She lives in a cage now, Gareth."
"A cage built of her own greed and my silence."
I turned toward the exit door, signaling to the guard.
"Irene, wait!" Gareth pleaded, half-rising from his chair before the guard firmly shoved him back down.
"Will you ever come back?"
"When I finish my sentence... when I am fifty years old and have nothing left... will you let me see you just once?"
I stopped at the heavy steel door.
I looked back over my shoulder at the ruined man who had once ruled my life with a raised eyebrow and a cold glance.
"I don't look backward, Gareth," I answered calmly.
May you like
"The dead belong in the ground."
"And as far as I am concerned, the Langston family died the moment I walked out your front door."
