Chapter 7 - The Inheritance of Curses
By the seventh day, the pressure turned from financial to physical. We were no longer safe in the apartment. Security teams—hired, not by the company, but by my mother’s private circle of loyalists—were systematically canvassing the city.
We had to move. We retreated to a remote cabin in the Berkshires, a property held in a blind trust that even my mother had forgotten about. It was here, in the isolation of the woods, that I found the final piece of the puzzle: a series of letters between my mother and her own mother.
The history of the Whitmore "matriarchs" was a cycle of trauma. My grandmother had suffered the same, if not worse, at the hands of her husband. She had passed down the "rules" of power as a form of armor. Control or be controlled. Trust is a liability. Love is a weakness.
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"She didn't just choose to be a monster," Audrey murmured, reading the brittle ink. "She was taught that being a monster was the only way to be safe."
It didn't excuse the bleach, or the suffering, or the attempt to steal our son. But it shifted the war. I realized I wasn't just fighting a person; I was fighting an intergenerational curse. If I defeated my mother but didn't stop the cycle, I would eventually become the very thing I despised.
