Chapter 2
After David found Edgar Monroe’s portrait, Monroe Manor stopped feeling like a house.
It felt like a question.
Every hallway seemed to lead back to that face.
His face.
Or close enough to make sleep difficult.
Elizabeth would not explain fully.
“Some things need time,” she said.
Then, on the seventh night after the wedding, David woke to footsteps again.
This time, the basement door stood open.
He went down.
The light flickered on.
And David froze.
Dozens of portraits covered the walls.
Edgar as a young man.
Edgar older.
Edgar from memory.
Edgar from grief.
And among them, newer paintings — David’s face, painted before he had ever agreed to marry her.
Elizabeth stood behind him.
“I painted Edgar for thirty years,” she said. “After he died, I kept trying to bring back the part of him time was taking from me.”
David looked at the walls.
“And then you saw me.”
“Yes.”
He turned toward the door.
It had closed.
Elizabeth held the key, her hand trembling.
“David,” she whispered, “please don’t leave. The doctors gave me one month. I am not afraid of dying. I am afraid of dying alone.”
David did not forgive Elizabeth that night.
Not immediately.
He stood in the basement of Monroe Manor, surrounded by dozens of painted faces that looked too much like his own, and felt the strange humiliation of realizing he had been chosen as a substitute for a dead man.
Elizabeth sat near the door, the key still in her hand.
But she no longer looked powerful.
She looked old.
Not in the way people mean when they talk about age, but in the deeper way — worn down by years of waking up inside a house full of memory and no living voice to answer it.
“You should have told me,” David said.
“I know.”
“You used my mother’s illness.”
Elizabeth lowered her eyes.
“I used what I had. Money. Timing. Your need. My loneliness.”
“That does not make it right.”
“No,” she said. “It only makes it true.”
Her honesty unsettled him more than a defense would have.
David looked at the portraits.
“Do you think I am Edgar?”
“No.”
“Then what am I to you?”
Elizabeth’s hand trembled around the key.
“A second chance to say goodbye properly.”
The answer was so fragile that David’s anger lost its sharp edge.
He thought of his mother in her narrow hospital bed.
Of the way he had signed forms, paid bills, counted pills, and feared the quiet that would come after she was gone.
He knew something about loneliness.
Not Elizabeth’s kind.
May you like
Not thirty years inside a mansion.
But enough.
