In Love with My Foster Uncle

Audrey's POV

The sound wasn't loud enough to be thunder.

I registered that first, before I was fully awake. Too low. Too contained, like something had snapped inside the walls rather than outside them. Maple launched off the mattress before my eyes were open — I heard her land, heard the frantic scrape of her claws on hardwood, and then silence. Not even a meow. She'd gone under the bed.

I lay still and listened.

Something was dripping.

I knew every sound this house made at night. The pipes in the east wing. The third step on the staircase. The kitchen window when the wind came off the harbor. This wasn't any of those. Slower. More even.

The hallway was dark. The light at the bottom of the stairs was on.

I remembered turning it off.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself this the entire way down the hall, my palm trailing the wall, feet cold against the floor. I was still telling myself this when I reached the top of the stairs and looked down.

My mother was on the floor.

She was on her side, one arm curled under her head like she'd just decided to lie down there. The posture was so ordinary that my brain kept trying to file it that way. The dark shape spreading out from her was harder to rationalize. It had already reached the edge of the blue rug and was bleeding slowly into the hardwood beyond.

Something metal in her hand. Catching the light from the floor lamp.

"Mom?"

She didn't move.

My father had his back to me, completely still. His shoulders were shaking.

I went down the last few stairs. My foot came down on something wet, and I stopped.

My brain did this thing where it just refused. Like a door slamming shut. I looked down, I saw what I was standing in, and something behind my eyes went very quiet and said: not yet.

"Dad." My voice came out steady. I don't know how. "What happened to Mom?"

He turned around.

I had never seen my father's face look like that. Not pale. Emptied. Like the blood had just packed up and left. He looked at me and something crossed his expression — a fracture, like something had been holding and now it wasn't.

He didn't answer my question.

"I'm sorry, Audrey." The words came out broken, uneven. "Forgive us. We didn't have another way."

We didn't have another way.

I heard those words and my body understood them before my mind did. Some part of me, faster and more honest than anything I could think, already knew.

I started moving toward him. "Dad, stand up. We need to call an ambulance, Mom is still—"

He picked up the gun from the floor beside her hand.

"Dad."

He looked at me one last time.

I've spent a long time trying to describe what was in that look. It wasn't goodbye — goodbye would have been easier. It was something heavier. Something meant for someone older, something I wasn't big enough to hold yet but was being handed anyway.

The second shot was quieter than I expected.

What came after, I can only give you in pieces.

I don't know if I screamed. I think I was making sounds, but I couldn't hear them. My knees hit the floor at some point and I felt nothing — no impact, no hardwood, just suddenly I was lower. My hands found my mother and I pressed down, the way you're supposed to, because if I kept pressure on it then she was still the kind of problem that could be solved.

She's fine. They're both fine. This is something I can fix if I just stay calm.

I said that, or something like it, over and over. Not for her. She was past hearing. I said it because my nervous system needed one more minute before it had to process what had actually happened in this room, and that was the only phrase I had left.

At some point the room was full of light and strangers.

The days that followed aren't a sequence. They're a pile.

A woman in a federal windbreaker pulled me away from my mother — not roughly, just firmly, the way you move an obstacle. Someone wrapped a silver emergency blanket around my shoulders and it crinkled every time I breathed. My hands had been photographed. My sleep shirt had been photographed. I sat in the back of a car, or a room — I lost track of the transition somewhere — while a man asked me, very patiently, what my father's last words had been.

I told him: I'm sorry and we didn't have another way.

He wrote both down. Then he asked what I thought my father meant by another way.

I said I didn't know. He kept asking.

A different agent showed me a photograph of the gun. I made it about three seconds before I turned and vomited onto the floor. Nobody seemed particularly surprised.

They took the computers from my father's study. My mother's phone. The account ledgers from the kitchen drawer, the lockbox from the hall closet. I watched from the stairs while they filled evidence bags, wrote numbers on white stickers, carried things out through our front door. Henry, our butler, stood at the edge of the room with his hands clasped in front of him, looking older than I'd ever seen him.

A federal attorney — not one my family had hired, someone assigned, someone whose name I forgot immediately — told me the Mercer accounts had been frozen pending asset forfeiture proceedings. The house was included. She mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that there was an education trust in my name. Clean money, she said. That part was fine.

I stared at a point past her left ear and thought about what my mother's rug was going to smell like once it dried.

The headline ran the next morning.

I saw it on a waiting room television — my parents' photo beneath the chyron, the caption reading: MERCER COUPLE LINKED TO VOSS CRIMINAL NETWORK — APPARENT DOUBLE SUICIDE BEFORE FEDERAL ARREST.

I couldn't process it. I couldn't connect them to any of that.

The official conclusion arrived fast. Tidy framing: faced with imminent federal arrest, the Mercers chose this. Guilt made legible. Case effectively closed.

They were wrong. I knew that the way you know things you can't prove. My mother sat with me through nightmares until sunrise. My father left my favorite breakfast outside my door after bad test scores and pretended not to notice, so I wouldn't have to see his disappointment. People like that don't do what they were being accused of.

But nobody was asking me who my parents were. They were only asking what my parents had done.

The cemetery was twenty minutes outside the city.

Four people at the graveside: me, Henry, the assigned attorney, a priest reading from a printed template with my parents' names filled in by hand. No flowers. No obituary. My father's parents had both passed years ago, one after the other. My mother's side was a different kind of absence — she never talked about them, except for one person who had come by when I was very small. I couldn't remember his face anymore. After that, I never met anyone who claimed to belong to that part of her life.

As for everyone from their social world, their business world, their twenty-plus years of building a life in this city — they all knew. That was exactly why none of them came.

The priest finished and closed his folder.

I kept thinking about the dirt. Whether the color matched the plot beside it. It was a completely useless thing to think about, and I couldn't stop.

"When do we go home?" I asked Henry.

He had that face — the one he made when bad news was coming and he was deciding how much to give at once. He told me we could return to collect personal items under supervision, but the house was part of the frozen estate. I couldn't stay there.

"Then where do I go?"

He didn't answer. A federal investigator had already approached him about further questioning. Henry, who had managed the Mercer household for fourteen years, wasn't going to escape the procedural net.

The attorney cleared her throat. "Your mother's will designates a temporary guardian. He's on his way."

I didn't ask who. I was too tired to learn the name of another stranger who got to decide things about my life.

They gave me one hour in my own bedroom.

An agent stood in the doorway. I wasn't allowed in my father's study, my parents' room, or downstairs. Just here — this space I'd lived in my whole life, which now felt like a hotel room with my things in it.

I folded three changes of clothes. I took the photos from my desk and left the frames behind. My old camera — the one my mother gave me for my fifteenth birthday, the leather strap worn soft from years of use. She'd promised me a new one for my coming-of-age celebration next month. That was never going to happen now.

I packed my laptop and a few other things, then zipped the suitcase shut.

Henry came to help with my bags. Then someone called him away for more questions. He said, I'll be right back.

I nodded. I kept packing.

That was the last time I saw him for a very long time. I didn't know it then.

Maple didn't want to go into the carrier. She pressed herself flat against the back of my closet and stared at me with an expression of profound personal betrayal. I sat on the floor in front of her and waited, and eventually — because she was a cat and cats make their own calculations — she walked in.

The reporters were already outside when I came through the front door.

There's a specific kind of silence right before it gets loud. I didn't recognize it in time.

The first question came from someone with a press badge, voice flat and professional: "Audrey, were you aware of your parents' financial ties to the Voss network?"

My throat closed. I'd been told to say no comment. The words were right there. They just wouldn't come out.

"Police have ruled this a suicide motivated by fear of arrest — do you have any response?"

A microphone appeared close to my face. A camera flash hit me sideways and the world went bright and wrong for half a second, and in that half-second something in my head jumped tracks.

Flash. The lamp on, when I'd turned it off. Flash. The dripping, even and slow. Flash. Her hand, and what was in it.

"As the daughter of accused criminals, do you feel any responsibility to the victims?"

Maple lurched inside the carrier. She let out a sound that was more panic than meow, and I gripped the handle tighter, and my chest just closed. Couldn't get any air in. The shutters kept going — one after another, one after another.

One step back. My heel hit the door.

I couldn't breathe. That was the whole problem. I just couldn't get any air in.

A black SUV pulled to the curb.

A man got out first. Broad, controlled, the kind of stillness that doesn't come from being calm but from being trained. He moved through the cluster of reporters without pushing anyone, just placed himself, and they shifted without quite knowing why.

Then the second door opened.

I don't know what I expected. Someone official-looking, maybe. Someone who'd shake the lawyer's hand and sign something.

He didn't look at the lawyers. He looked at me.

Dark coat, no hat, the harbor wind doing something to his hair he wasn't bothering to fix. He crossed the distance between us like the crowd wasn't there, like the cameras weren't there, like the only thing in this entire street worth navigating toward was me.

It should have felt strange.

It didn't.

He stopped close enough that he was between me and the nearest camera. He looked at my hands first. Then my face. Then, briefly, at the carrier.

"Are you hurt?"

I tried to answer. I wasn't sure if my head actually moved.

The attorney was already beside him, saying something firm about legal consequences for harassing a minor. The microphones pulled back a few inches. Not much. Enough.

He looked at me again and didn't move. Just stood there, very steady, in a way that made the noise feel slightly more distant — like something solid I could put between myself and all of it.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Gabriel Blackwood."

The name landed somewhere in my chest and found something to catch on. When I looked at his face again, something from a long time ago started to surface — a room, two voices, my mother talking with someone who looked younger then, less certain of himself.

The way my mother said his name. Like it meant safe.

You can trust him.

I held onto that. It was the only thing I had.