“You aren’t taking a single thing from this house because everything here is mine now,” she replied, her voice low and terrifyingly calm.
“It is just a picture of my boy,” I whispered, tears blurring my vision.
“If you wanted to be his mother so badly, you can go mourn him somewhere else,” she said, pointing a manicured finger toward the dark, gravel driveway.
Outside, the wind didn’t sound like a natural breeze; it sounded like a jagged warning echoing through the trees of the Connecticut suburbs. The long walk toward the transport car felt like a sentence that had been written for me long before Terrence ever fell ill.
Mud clung to my shoes as I eventually reached the remote trailhead where the driver dropped me off in the middle of the night. Every branch that cracked in the darkness seemed to whisper the same cruel truth that I was no longer wanted by anyone left living.
By the time I reached the cabin, something deep inside my spirit had shifted away from simple sadness. I realized then that Brigitte hadn’t sent me to this wilderness to live out my remaining years in peace; she had sent me here to disappear and be forgotten.