Page 17 of The Golden Hour

The hazy world clears up, allowing space for Finn’s words—his rage and pain—to hit me like a flash fire and vaporize the shell of my delusion. Into the void rises doubt. Once, I believed it was better to save myself and leave my little sisters behind, than to stay and suffer. Or, God forbid, fight the family and fail, like my cousin who just wanted the freedom to love who he chose.

My uncle loved me, wanted to protect me, but he also crippled me. He convinced me I was weak. That the tide of the family was impossible to turn, their influence so vast no one person could stand against it. That my options were to either surrender or escape. But Finn is absolutely right. I’m no hero—I’m a coward.

Confusion battles clarity in a spin cycle of thoughts.

Maybe he is the only one willing to do the right thing.

He’s going to get himself killed.

What’s the moral price of looking the other way as Vivian widens the net of her power?

There’s no stopping her.

She’s not going to be satisfied until she’s forming policy in Washington, DC.

How many deaths has she orchestrated? How many bribes, under-the-table transaction, and illegal dealings?

Too many.

With my blinders torn off, childhood memories lift from my subconscious, gaining substance and detail as they feed on my newfound focus. Memories I’ve spent years burying, that bring with them equal parts shame and shock.

And they chill me to my bones.

One evening after my father was arrested, I heard voices in his office and snuck close to listen. My uncle Franco was in the middle of telling my stepmother that the judge in my father’s trial couldn’t be bought. He was angry. Desperate. But what struck me most was Vivian’s response. I expected her to demand he find a way, to express her own frustration… but she didn’t. She didn’t say anything at all, and I crept away from the open office door before any of the staff could spot me and haul me inside for punishment.

Another time, a filing cabinet in the basement had been left unlocked and ajar. Inside were hundreds of manila files with names printed neatly on them in my father’s handwriting. I wasn’t so lucky that time. Vivian found me as I was lifting the first file, and she slapped me so hard I had a bruise on my cheek for a week.

After the conviction and sentencing, there were more changes. Or maybe I was merely old enough to start noticing things that had been happening for years. There were midnight meetings with mean-looking men in the soundproofed basement. Ritzy cocktail parties with a slew of famous faces that my sisters and I weren’t allowed to attend. Weekend pool parties with pretty young girls on my uncles’ arms. Those same girls, weeping and bereft, whisked away in private cars the next morning.

I can still see my stepmother’s smile, small and victorious, whenever she caught me where I wasn’t supposed to be. And I remember well the resulting isolation and depravation. Long days spent locked in my bedroom—a prison of fancy dolls, ruffled curtains, and loneliness.

I was older, maybe twelve, when our longtime nanny, Adele, was fired. She begged and wept on the front stoop as her belongings were tossed into the driveway. I hid in a nearby drawing room, listening to her ramble, her voice high and thick with tears. I won’t tell a soul. I swear it, Mrs. Avellino. Please, don’t take me from the children.

For the first time since my youth, I wonder what happened to her. Whether she’s alive.

My jaded inner voice answers easily enough: You know she isn’t.

I walk for another hour, a spectator to my emotional evolution, my thoughts falling like the raindrops on the canopy above. Drip, drip… they hit me and are absorbed.

Feeding a new version of myself.

Changing me.

* * *

“You okay, Grace?” asks my current patron, a regular whose craggy face is pinched in a frown. “You’re lookin’ more pale than usual.”

“She’s fine,” Molly says, her voice so close and unexpected that my fingers spasm on the glass I’m refilling from a tap.

Molly deftly takes over the pour and murmurs, “Why don’t you head home a little early. It’s a slow night.” She hands the pint to the customer, who nods and heads back to his friends.

“I’m sorry,” I say reflexively.

Her brows lift. “For what?”

My smile wobbles but holds. “Be honest—I’m a horrible bartender.”

She laughs. “You really are. I’ve never dealt with so much broken glass and wasted alcohol in my life. But no one here cares.” She gestures behind her to the sparsely populated bar. “We love our misfits in Solstice Bay. Hell, the town was founded by outcasts who wanted a place to call their own. Besides, we’ve had quite a day, haven’t we?”

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