Page 59 of Once Broken
“What did you mean?”Riley asked, her voice soft.“When you surrendered, you apologized to your mother.Said you were too weak.”
Sarah didn’t respond immediately.“My earliest memories,” she finally said, “are of sitting in front of a television while my mother played Weston Black’s films.Three, four, five times a day.‘Watch how he frames this shot,’ she’d say.‘See how he uses light and contrast here.’I was five years old, and she’d slap me if my attention wandered.”
She looked up at Riley, her eyes haunted.“By the time I was seven, I could recite every line of dialogue from his films.My mother would test me, and each mistake earned punishment.A missed line might mean no dinner.A forgotten camera angle could mean being locked in the closet until I could describe the scene correctly.”
“Your mother was Myra Brooks—Weston Black’s daughter.”
“The guardian of his legacy.The keeper of his grudges.I never knew my grandfather—he died long before I was born—but my mother made sure his ghost occupied every corner of our home.His genius.His suffering.The injustice of his erasure from film history.”
She shifted in her seat, the handcuffs clinking softly.“When I was twelve, my mother started talking about ‘the plan.’How we would avenge my grandfather someday.She’d describe it while brushing my hair at night, these elaborate scenarios of revenge, her voice so sweet and tender, like other mothers might use for bedtime stories.”
“You were a child,” Riley said softly.“That’s a terrible burden to place on a child.”
“It wasn’t a burden,” Sarah countered, her voice suddenly fierce.“It was a sacred trust.My purpose.My inheritance.”The intensity faded as quickly as it had flared.“At least, that’s what my mother taught me to believe.”
She fell silent for several blocks, watching the city slide past the window.When she spoke again, her voice had acquired a distant quality, as if she were reciting.
“After my mother died, I found her journals.Decades of entries, all focused the revenge she never managed to execute.Pages and pages of detailed plans, some dating back to before I was born.And then, toward the end, entries about me.”
Sarah’s eyes met Riley’s.“She wrote that I was weak.That she feared I lacked the necessary resolve to carry out the plan.That I was too soft, too easily distracted by ordinary pursuits.She was disappointed in me, even as she was dying.”
“So you set out to prove her wrong.”
“I spent ten years preparing,” Sarah confirmed.“Perfecting my skills as a production designer.Studying the murders in my grandfather’s films.Gathering information.I told myself I was fulfilling my destiny, honoring my grandfather’s memory and my mother’s wishes.”
She glanced down at her cuffed wrists.“But when it came to the final moment with Lucy Morgan, I couldn’t do it.Not with your gun aimed at me.”
The van slowed as it approached the police headquarters.Sarah spoke softly.“I was too weak, just as my mother feared.And the most terrible part?”Her voice broke slightly.“Part of me is relieved.What does that make me?”
Before Riley could respond, the van came to a stop.The back doors opened, flooding the interior with daylight.Officers appeared and escorted Sarah away.
Riley got out of the van slowly, thinking of her own daughters.April, still vulnerable to Leo Dillard’s obsession.Jilly, watching her sister and mother navigate dangers she was only beginning to understand.What legacies was Riley herself passing down to them, knowingly or unknowingly?What might haunt them long after she was gone?
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Riley cradled the coffee mug between her palms as she finished telling Bill about the final moments of the Atlanta case.Even the sun spilling into their family room couldn’t dispel the images that Sarah Brooks’ confession had left in her mind.Three murders—two completed, one attempted—all because a mother had twisted her daughter into an instrument of decades-old vengeance.
“So Sarah just...gave up?”Bill asked as he processed the story.“After all that planning, all those years of preparation, she couldn’t go through with the third murder?”
Riley nodded, setting her mug down on the table.“When I had her in the police van afterward, she said she had failed her mother, but that part of her felt relieved.The whole time she was talking, all I could think about was what it must have been like to grow up in that house.To be a child whose only value was as a weapon in someone else’s war.”
Bill reached out, his hand warm as it covered hers.“That got to you.”
“It did,” Riley admitted.“More than usual.The way Sarah described her childhood—her mother forcing her to memorize her grandfather’s films, punishing her for forgetting camera angles, locking her in closets...”She shook her head.“Children aren’t supposed to carry that kind of burden.”
“No, they’re not,” Bill agreed softly.
Riley stared into the depths of her coffee.“It makes me think about our girls.About the things they’ve been through, what it could be doing to them even now.”
“April and Jilly are resilient,” Bill said.“And they have something Sarah Brooks never had—people who love them for who they are, not what they can be used for.”
“I know that.”Riley’s voice caught slightly.“But resilience has its limits.April was kidnapped.She watched me kill a man.And Jilly—God, the things that happened to her before I found her....And now they both have to live with the knowledge that Leo Dillard is out there somewhere, fixated on our family.”
Bill’s jaw tightened at the mention of Leo’s name.He withdrew his hand, wrapping it around his own mug.“I’ve tried everything I can think of to locate him.Called in every favor.But he’s gone completely dark.No credit card activity, no cell phone pings, nothing.”
“That’s almost worse than knowing where he is,” Riley said.“At least then we’d have something concrete to guard against.This way...”She gestured vaguely at the air between them.“Every stranger on the street could be him in disguise.Every car that drives by too slowly could be him watching.Every hang-up call could be him checking to see if we’re home.”
“We’re doing a lot to protect them,” Bill reminded her.“April has security at Jefferson Bell.I’m picking Jilly up from school every day.We’ve changed our routines, varied our schedules.”