Page 128 of The Only One Left

To this day, I’m still not sure where I found the strength to get out of bed and leave my room. Sheer force of will, I suppose, brought on by a mother’s fierce determination. Yet pain still tore through my body as I slid out of bed. My legs buckled, and for a moment I thought I’d collapse onto the floor. But I remained steady, pushing through the agony, needing to find my child.

Before leaving the room, I spotted something sitting on the nightstand.

A knife.

The same one used to sever the cord connecting me and my baby, now forgotten during the commotion following the birth. I picked it up, telling myself I needed something to use as protection. Against what, I didn’t know. Perhaps my father. Or my sister and Miss Baker. Deep down, though, I knew the opposite to be true.

I was seeking a weapon.

And if anyone needed protection, it was my father.

Knife in hand, I left my room, pushed through pain on my way down the hallway, and began to hobble down the Grand Stairs. At the landing, I stopped and listened. There were voices coming from the billiard room. One was my father. The other belonged toRicky. And although I couldn’t make out what they were saying, both of them sounded angry.

I descended the remaining steps slowly, careful not to make a sound. I needed to know what they were saying before deciding if I should make my presence known. If their voices calmed, then perhaps it meant Ricky was successful in persuading my father to let us wed, let us keep the baby, let us live happily ever after.

I should have realized that those things only exist in fairy tales. For there was no happily ever after. Not for me.

As I reached the ground floor, I glimpsed Lenora near the top of the Grand Stairs. “Virginia,” she whispered as she nervously clung to the banister. “What are you doing?”

I refused to answer.

She’d find out soon enough.

As I continued moving to the billiard room, I heard her footfalls on the second-floor hallway. Running away, of course. Too cowardly to face the damage she’d helped create. If only she had let me run away instead, none of this would have happened.

There was noise up ahead as well, making it clear nothing about the situation had calmed. My father’s voice had only gotten louder, booming out of the billiard room and echoing down the hall.

Before I reached them, I paused for a moment at the four portraits in the hall. My father intended the paintings to make us appear like one big, happy family, secure in our status, content with our lives.

To achieve that effect, he should have had Peter Ward picture us together. A vast canvas depicting the four of us in our regal best, posed oh so carefully in one of Hope’s End’s many well-appointed rooms.

Instead, Peter had painted us separately. In the process, he accidentally depicted the family as we really were--four strangers,utterly alone, each one of us boxed in by a gilded frame, unable or unwilling to escape.

Not me, I decided.

I was determined to leave this place forever.

And I would take my baby with me.

Even if I had to kill to do it.

Tightening my grip on the knife, I then turned and entered the billiard room.

FORTY

Upstairs, the woman I’d thought was Lenora Hope is in bed but wide awake, as if she knew I’d be coming.

No surprise there.

I always had the feeling she was more aware than she let on. Virginia likely had known this moment would arrive since my first night here, when she typed those tantalizing words.

i want to tell you everything

She didn’t, yet I learned it all anyway. Right up to the moment she went searching for her father, a knife gripped in her hand.

“I ran to alert my mother, who was in her usual daze,” Lenora told me. “No one had bothered to tell her about Virginia, the urgent labor, my father’s orders to take the baby. She had no idea. But her mind seemed to sharpen as I told her what had happened—and what I worried was about to happen. She patted my cheek and said, ‘Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll handle this.’ It was the last thing she ever said to me.”

Silence fell over the kitchen then. Even though we didn’t acknowledge it, I knew both Lenora and I were recalling our mothers’ final words.

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