The Dying Man's Legacy

The steel door of the "behavioral correction facility" clanged shut, freeing me after five years of unspeakable torment.

I returned to my grand New England mansion, my face a roadmap of scars, my body wracked by a terminal illness.

Yet, my mother, Eleanor, and my wife, Olivia, greeted me not with solace, but with cold accusation, immediately blaming me for my younger brother Jake' s fabricated trauma.

Olivia chillingly presented divorce papers, her eyes devoid of warmth, sneering that my hundred cuts were nothing compared to Jake' s supposed suffering.