Chapter 19 - The Horizon on Route 8
The fire burned down to a bed of glowing red embers by midnight, casting long, pulsing shadows across the timber beams of the study ceiling. I stood up, stretched my arms, and walked over to the French doors leading out to the rear deck.
I unlocked the deadbolt and slid the glass door open. The night air rushed in—crisp, biting, and charged with the clean scent of damp pine needles and approaching frost. Stepping out onto the wooden planks, I looked out toward the dark, wooded ravine that bordered the property. Beyond the ridge, invisible in the moonless night, the winding ribbon of Route 8 stretched north toward the Pennsylvania mountains and open country.
My mind felt remarkably clear, stripped of every unnecessary attachment, every hollow obligation, and every parasitic relationship that had drained my energy over the past seven years. I wasn't bitter. Bitterness is just another form of emotional debt, and I had spent the last twenty-four hours balancing every ledger I owned.
May you like
Tomorrow, I would pack a single bag, lock the front door behind me using my heavy brass key, and take the Audi north toward the cabin in the Berkshires I had purchased three years ago under a private family trust—a place where the cell towers didn't reach and the only corporate reports worth reading were the weather patterns shifting across the mountain ridges.
Let Sienna face the federal prosecutors. Let Andre explain his offshore shell companies to a federal magistrate. Their world was built on sand, and the tide had already come in.
