The House Behind My Dreams

Arthur looked down at Mark, and his voice turned poisonous. “She went to him instead.”

I stared at my husband. A groan slipped from him as he began to stir on the basement floor.

“Mark knew I was getting close,” Arthur said, moving toward the table. “He understood he couldn’t simply take her somewhere else. I would have followed the medical transport. I could have claimed her as her closest relative with her old papers. So your clever, charming husband did something else. He married her.”

My thoughts flashed to the corkboard, the marriage certificate, and the red stroke across Mark’s name.

“He married a woman who was dying,” Arthur murmured. His hands tightened into fists. “He gave her his legal name. He locked away her medical information using spousal privacy protections. Then he put her in a guarded private hospice in upstate New York, paying through his own company accounts. When I finally got through the legal barriers and located the place, she was gone. She died with his hand in hers. Not mine.”

Warm tears blurred everything in front of me and ran down my face.

Mark hadn’t married my mother to get at her money. He hadn’t done it to hurt me. He had married her to put legal walls between her and a monster, protecting the last days of a woman who was dying.

He had kept the truth from me, too. He’d borne the knowledge that my mother had lived—and that she’d died in pain—without telling me, so I wouldn’t have to lose her all over again.

“There was nothing left I could do to her,” Arthur said. He bent and lifted the heavy shotgun. This time, he held it by the grip, not as a cane. His finger rested near the trigger guard. “So I chose the one thing she truly loved. You.”

He brought the barrel up and aimed it at Mark’s chest.

“He came here today to look for her old belongings,” Arthur went on quietly. “He wanted anything that could connect me to keeping her prisoner. I heard him upstairs. I arranged this room for you, Chloe. I wanted you to see it. I wanted you to decide your husband was a monster. I needed you to hate him, so when I shot him, you’d be grateful.”

His thumb moved. The safety clicked off, its sharp metallic sound cutting through the damp air.

“Now,” Arthur ordered. “Move back.”

Mark’s eyelids shifted open. He looked dazed, blood running from his chin to his clean white shirt. Then he spotted the shotgun and Arthur. At last, he saw me.

He didn’t beg. He didn’t raise his hands.

His gaze settled on mine, suddenly steady. “Run,” he whispered.

I stayed where I was.

My eyes dropped to the thick metal lockbox beside my feet. Above the folding table, a lone fluorescent tube swayed on its wire, glaring down from roughly six feet overhead.

Arthur shifted his hold on the shotgun. His finger edged toward the trigger.

I acted before I could think.

I seized the lockbox handle with both hands and dragged it off the floor, summoning every scrap of strength and panic in me. Then I threw it upward.

The box struck the fluorescent fixture with a burst of breaking glass and electricity.

Shards scattered like icy rain. The light snapped out, and the windowless basement vanished into suffocating black.

Arthur cried out. A beat later, the shotgun boomed. Its flash lit the room in a brief flare of yellow, revealing the blast striking the concrete wall well to my left. Stone dust burst into the air.

I dropped hard, my knees scraping the floor. Pain meant nothing. I crawled through the darkness, patting the cold concrete until I found the wool of Mark’s suit.

“Mark, get up!” I shouted, my ears still ringing.

I caught his collar and hauled. He staggered upright, slow and unsteady, but adrenaline seemed to reach him at last. We lurched forward together. My shin cracked against the first wooden stair, pain flaring up my leg. I kept going.

“Up!” I shoved him from behind.

We climbed the steep steps on hands and knees. Below, Arthur coughed in the dust and swore, fumbling to load another shell into the gun.

At the landing, Mark threw his weight into the kitchen door. We burst onto the linoleum, where gray daylight spilled through the windows.

I scrambled up, seized the basement-door handle, and slammed it shut as boots struck the stairs below.

I leaned my weight against the wood and drove the first deadbolt across. Its metal click rang through the kitchen.

Arthur struck from the other side. The door shuddered in its frame. I cried out and braced myself, forcing the second bolt home, then the third.

Mark and I had trapped Arthur below, but the pounding continued against the locked door.