Chapter 2 - The Shrine in the Shadows
Midnight had always been my hour. It was the only time I could slip back into my family home through the back cellar door without triggering my mother’s hawk-like surveillance. I needed to retrieve my heavy-duty anti-anxiety medication, which I had accidentally left sitting on my bedside table in the rush of my Friday afternoon eviction.
The house was pitch black, wrapped in a suffocating, tomb-like silence. The heavy Persian runner in the hallway muffled my footsteps as I crept toward the back wing of the house—toward my bedroom. The room that was supposed to be mine.
As I approached the door, I noticed a strange, flickering golden glow spilling out from underneath the crack. I frowned, slowing my pace. My heart gave a heavy, apprehensive thud against my ribs.
I crept closer, holding my breath, and peered around the corner. The sight that met my eyes froze the blood in my veins and turned my stomach to lead.
My mother’s wealthy, impeccably groomed friend, Mrs. Thorpe—Chloe’s mother—was standing directly in front of my deadbolted bedroom door. Her head was bowed, her eyes tightly shut, and her manicured hands were pressed together in solemn, tearful prayer. A row of heavy brass prayer candles flickered on a small mahogany table placed right outside my threshold.
And beside her stood my mother, Evelyn.
Evelyn wasn't just standing there; she was performing. She was sobbing theatrically into a monogrammed lace tissue, her shoulders shaking with deeply convincing grief.
"I still cannot bear to turn the knob, Eleanor," Evelyn choked out, her voice dripping with fabricated agony. "It's... it's exactly as she left it on the day she passed. Her clothes, her books, her spirit... frozen in time. I just come here every night to feel her near me."
Mrs. Thorpe wrapped a comforting, sympathetic arm around Evelyn’s shoulders, patting her gently. "You are a saint, Evelyn. Bearing such a tragic cross with such immense grace. Losing Anastasia so young... it's a wound that will never heal."
I pressed my back hard against the hallway wallpaper, clamping both hands over my mouth to stifle the animalistic gasp clawing its way up my throat.
You do not pray over a door unless you believe the person on the second side of it is permanently in the ground.
My mother hadn't told Chloe's family I was in Atlanta. She hadn't told them I was working, or traveling, or living my life. She had told them I was dead. She had turned my mental health struggle into a dramatic, sympathy-generating tragedy, casting herself in the role of the ultimate, grieving mother of a lost angel.
I waited in the dark, my limbs turning to ice, until Mrs. Thorpe finally hugged Evelyn goodnight and my parents retreated to their master suite upstairs. The heavy click of their bedroom door locking echoed like a gunshot through the quiet house.
Slowly, like a phantom haunting its own wake, I stepped out of the shadows. I walked down the hall and reached for the deadbolt. My fingers, shaking uncontrollably, turned the key. The lock slid open with a soft, metallic click.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside my room.
It wasn't a bedroom anymore. It was a mausoleum.
The curtains were drawn tight, blocking out the moonlight. A heavy, suffocating scent of lilies and old dust hung thick in the air. But it was the center of the room that made my knees buckle.
Resting on a black velvet cloth atop my old study desk was a framed, professional photograph of the exact dogwood tree I had sold to Chloe at the nursery just yesterday. The white blossoms gleamed softly in the candlelight. But at the base of the photograph, resting on a polished mahogany stand, was a freshly carved, solid granite tombstone.
I stumbled forward, reaching out a trembling hand to touch the cold, polished stone. Reflected in the flickering candlelight, the engraved lettering stared back at me with horrifying finality:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF ANASTASIA DUNAWAY.
1995 - 2014.
Forever Young, Forever Missed.
My heart fractured into a million jagged pieces. The blood froze completely in my veins. I wasn't just an embarrassment to them; I was an expired asset. Eight years ago, when I suffered that breakdown, my mother hadn't just locked me away—she had legally or socially murdered me. She had spun a magnificent, deeply woven web of lies to high society, claiming her fragile, troubled daughter had succumbed to her demons and passed away quietly in a sanatorium, allowing Evelyn to bask in the endless, intoxicating waves of pity, flowers, and condolences from the elite.
And then, the most horrifying, sickening twist of cosmic irony slammed into my chest like a physical blow: I had personally selected, tagged, and blessed the memorial tree for my own fake death. I had helped my future sister-in-law purchase the very monument that celebrated my non-existence.
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Standing there in the dark, staring at my own carved stone, the grief that had weighed me down for a decade didn't break me. Instead, it evaporated instantly, replaced by something dark, cold, and razor-sharp.
My agony hardened into an icy, lethal resolve.
