“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild and Eileen’s new romance continued to deepen even as they found themselves having to confront some difficult issues. Eileen shared more about her conflicting feelings about her work to dismantle the Thorne family business from the inside which uncovered deeper feelings about race and class and the traumatic legacy slavery had woven into the fabric of their pasts. Their conversation was interrupted by an angry call from Gerry who had just found out about Eileen’s role in project Evergreen.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“Never mind that. Answer my goddamned question. I want to know how long you’ve been plotting against me.”
Millie was sitting across from her father in his private study. The vast plane of his Chippendale desk with its ornate inlays, fussy scrollwork, and filigrees stood between them. The desk, normally uncluttered except for a tidy stack of binders, a laptop, and maybe a couple of Monte Blanc pens carefully aligned North to South on one of the desktop’s leather panels was littered with half-empty sleeves of crackers and an assortment of dirty coffee mugs and whiskey glasses. There was a greasy pizza box laying open with a couple of congealed slices of waxy pepperoni. In the open lid was a messy pile of pages that appeared to be printouts of email correspondence, tables filled with audit data, and graphs of profit and loss breakdowns.
“I wasn’t plotting against you. Okay, maybe I should have been upfront about it, but I knew you’d just shoot me down.”
He threw down a stack of papers he had been holding. “I had David pull everything related to your so-called project Evergreen. Evergreen, my ass, you should call it what it is: clear-cut, strip-mine, rape and pillage. You thought you’d just be able to liquidate three of our divisions and I wouldn’t notice? Or maybe you were just waiting for me to die since you and your uncle have decided that’s not but a couple of weeks away.”
She couldn’t look at him. Her heart was pounding, and her face was flushed. She couldn’t remember a time when he was ever this angry. She felt like a thirteen-year-old girl again being called into his office for sneaking out the night before.
“So now I’m responsible for your death. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You believe him.” He looked at her as if she had punched him in the gut. “I know you think your uncle Wild hung the moon, but you know what he is? He’s a child. He’s never lived in the real world and has no idea how it works and this whole business is just some way for him to feel important.”
She couldn’t look at him. Of course he couldn’t believe he was going to die. Could she blame him? It was too much for anyone. What if he was right? What if Wild was crazy and she had just been sucked into his delusion? The thought made her woozy until she remembered the journals, leather bound pages upon pages of evidence.
“You can believe what you want to believe daddy. But if it’s true, do you really want to spend your last days fighting over money and some legacy that you bought into? We could go somewhere, just you and me. We could go to that little town in Switzerland that you love so much.”
“No, Millie. The only thing I’m gonna do is stop this thing in its tracks. You have betrayed me and there’s no two ways about it.”
He made a show of organizing the papers on his desk into a stack, closing the pizza box, and sweeping the cracker crumbs into a pile. His hands were trembling. He sniffled and cleared his throat. She leaned forward and took one of his hands.
“Daddy, I’m sorry. I love you.”
His shoulders began to shake, and he cried without making a sound. She gripped his hand tighter and was about to move around the desk to hug him, but he yanked his hand away and stood.
“No, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be Judas one minute and Mary Magdalene the next. This is unforgivable. You get out of here. Go try to have your little socialist revolution led by Wilder Thorne, the great oracle.” He spit these last words out with an expression that was pinched and cruel. “You think I don’t know he’s behind this? You think I’m a fool?”
He picked up the pizza box and hurled it across the study. It flapped open like a large flightless bird and fell short of hitting the bookcase. She stood very still, her whole body clenched. When he looked back at her, she opened her mouth to produce words she couldn’t find.
“Get out,” he said in little more than a whisper. She didn’t move. He pointed to the door and shouted. “Get out of my house! Now!”
She turned and walked out of his study. Behind her she heard something heavy hit the wall and fall to the floor. She hurried down the hall and across the great room where she retrieved her purse from the couch and then went out the front door. The late August air was stifling, so thick with humidity it was hard to breathe. In her car she cranked on the AC but didn’t drive away. She felt sick to her stomach. His disapproval was unbearable but what had she expected him to do when he found out? She had betrayed him. No, that’s not why he was really upset, it was only the money and the power that mattered to him. The prospect of losing his status upset him more than anything else. No, that wasn’t fair. He was afraid. Surely, he was. And he was jealous. He had always competed with Wild. She could see that now, but why?
She had never interrogated their relationship, only accepted it as one does a thing that’s brokenness defines it. But then, her daddy was defined by his lack of definition. Of these two men who loomed so large in her life, Wild was not the mysterious one, even with his crazy gift and eccentric ways. She knew him. She didn’t know her father. He had no roots. She imagined him a seedling blown by a violent storm that carried him far from his native soil and dropped him beneath the shade of an ancient hemlock where his tiny radicle was able to find purchase, grafting itself into the folds of the great tree.
When she was a child, she had asked about his parents, why she had never met them. Your pappy and nana Thorne are my parents, doodlebug. When she was older, she hadn’t accepted this dodge and pressed harder. Not all of us are blessed with loving, capable parents, Mills. My father’s a cruel man, and my mother died when I was twelve. He never shared more. When she asked her mom, she was shocked to learn that she had no more information. How strange. Almost as strange as the fact that the Thornes had welcomed Gerald into the fold, this man without a family, without a name. But then, nothing was like it was depicted in the movies. People were a mass of contradictions. She understood this more than anyone. As she replayed the scene, the emotion in her father’s contorted face, she intuited there was something much more than hurt pride. It was the look of a scorned lover. He had been in love with Wild, envied him, maybe wanted to be him. It made her sad to think about his desperation. It certainly explained his vehemence. Losing to Wild now, just days before he would die, was probably excruciating. She felt like she might be sick. How could she be so cruel and self-absorbed? How could this crusade she volunteered for be more important than making her father happy in the few days he had left?
She slumped back into her seat and stared out the window at the ostentatious house where one man lived. She thought of the little villages they had passed through on their trip to the Amazon where entire multi-generational families lived in a space smaller than the pool house where her father’s guests could change into swimsuits that cost more than one of those families lived on for a month. She hated Wild for making her see what she had denied for so long. She hated him for putting her in this position with her father. She hated him for his goddamned curse and wished she had never picked up that journal.
Her phone began to buzz from inside her purse. She reached to see who it was, fully expecting it to be her father but it was Raina’s face who filled the screen. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. She let it vibrate in her hands four times before swiping to accept the call.
“Hey.”
“Hi, love, are you okay?” Raina’s tone downshifted quickly from casual to deeply concerned.
“Um… no, not really. It was terrible.”
“What happened?”
“He found out everything. He hates me. He was so upset. I’ve never seen him so angry and… hurt.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m sitting in the driveway. He screamed at me and told me to get out.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve that.”
“I did. He’s going to die and all I’ve been focused on is this project that’s totally insane. Why am I even doing it?”
“You know why.”
She did know why. Since she had made the decision to pursue the project, she had felt decidedly lighter, freer. They were silent for a moment. Raina was good at making space. She didn’t have to hit you over the head to make a point. It was a disarming quality. Millie was accustomed to filling the spaces, proving her worth, making her case.
“I thought maybe he’d be different now, knowing that… you know, that he’s gonna be gone. But he’s not. He’s still…”
“He’s still your dad. Some things don’t change. Give him a little time.”
“He doesn’t have time, Raina.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. I know he’ll do everything in his power to stop what we’re doing. He’s already started.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I have no idea. Everything sucks. I miss my mom. I don’t want my dad to die. Especially not the way things are between us. I wish I’d never listened to Wild.”
“It’s not too late, is it? Things could change. He could have a change of heart.”
How could Raina still have so much faith in humanity? Her father had disowned her, wouldn't even speak to her, and still she remained a hopeful person. She believed in the goodness of people even when there was no evidence of it.
“I don’t know if I can do it,” Millie said.
“Do what, honey?”
“Any of it. I can’t forgive him for how he is, but I can’t just move forward with this thing and make him spend his last days fighting me.”
“Then don’t. Just let it go for now. What’s the hurry?”
“I wanted him to see the plan and see why it matters, why it’s important. It’s stupid, but I think I was expecting him to have a Christmas Carol kind of epiphany. But he’s not going to. He can’t.”
“Of course he can’t. You didn’t give him a chance to. You went around him.”
“I did. But he wouldn’t have bought into it no matter how I tried to spin it. It goes against everything in him.”
“Is he really such a monster? Maybe he’s just been focused on the wrong thing most of his life. People don’t always act in their own best interests, especially people who are really hurt.”
“I know he’s not a monster, but he can be so vain, and he can be so cruel when he feels threatened and he feels threatened most of the time.”
“Why don’t you come home? Let me take care of you.”
“I will soon.”
When Millie set down her phone and looked up, she saw her father standing in the large open doorway. He looked small and disheveled in his sweatpants and a wrinkled golf shirt with the collar sticking up on one side. The expression on his face wasn’t angry anymore, it was the expression of someone who had given up. It was an expression he never wore. He raised a hand to wave to her. It was the same gesture he had done every day he dropped her off at school until she was fifteen but with none of the affection and twice the longing.
She waved back then rolled the window down.
“I love you, Daddy. I’m sorry.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything. He continued to stand in the doorway, and she wondered if she should get out of the car and rush to him– beg him to forgive her. But she couldn’t do that. They were too much alike in this way. He opened his mouth to speak but then thought better of it. He turned, went back inside, and closed the door. She put the car into gear, steered around the circular drive, down the hill and out the front gate.
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In the reality show competition for Houze, a revolutionary eco-home, six contestants face a winner-takes-all challenge. Beneath the surface of sustainability, altruism battles greed, turning a hopeful vision into a life and death struggle. Fans of “Nine Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty will love this story.
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