Chapter 6 - The Transition
The next three days were a whirlwind of quiet, tense activity.
My mother did not leave her room during the day. We could hear her footsteps pacing the floorboards upstairs, and occasionally the sound of a cabinet closing or a telephone ringing. She was calling everyone—her friends, her bank, her lawyers—trying to find a loophole, a way back into the kingdom she had lost. But the doors were closed. The Whitmore name, which she had used as a shield and a weapon for decades, was no longer hers to command.
Richard came by on Tuesday with a moving van. He didn’t come to the front door; he went straight to the side entrance to help our mother pack her personal belongings. I stood on the porch, watching them load boxes of her designer clothes, her expensive crystal, and her countless portraits of herself.
She came out of the house once, wrapped in a dark silk scarf and wearing large sunglasses, even though the sky was overcast. She stopped at the bottom of the steps, looking at me where I stood.
“You think you’ve inherited a fortune, David,” she said, her voice bitter and thin. “But you’ve only inherited a tomb. Without me, this family is nothing. This house is just old wood and damp plaster. You’ll see.”
“This house is whatever we make it, Mother,” I said. “And for the first time in my life, there is no fear in it.”
She didn’t answer. She climbed into the passenger seat of Richard’s SUV, and they drove away, the moving truck following close behind.
That evening, the house felt different. It was quieter, lighter, as if a heavy, suffocating fog had finally rolled out to sea.
Sebastian and I went through the rooms, opening the heavy velvet curtains that my mother had always kept drawn to protect the carpets from the sun. We let the warm Charleston breeze blow through the high-ceilinged hallways, carrying the scent of salt marsh and jasmine inside.
Camila ran through the long gallery, her bare feet pattering happily on the polished hardwood floors. She stopped in front of a large portrait of my grandfather that hung above the fireplace in the library.
“Is that the nice man who gave Sebastian the key?” she asked, pointing up at the oil painting.
May you like
“Yes, sweetie,” I said, kneeling down beside her. “That’s your great-grandfather. He wanted to make sure you had a big, beautiful home to play in.”
Camila looked at the painting for a long moment, then turned and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I like him,” she whispered. “And I like our new home.”
