Chapter 6 - The Garage Apartment
The detached guest cottage above the three-car garage was clean, well-lit, and entirely adequate for a single resident. It featured a compact kitchenette, a modest bedroom, and a small sitting area overlooking the back garden. To anyone else, it would have been a cozy retreat. To Margaret Vance, accustomed to a twenty-room manor with vaulted ceilings and antique oil paintings, it was a Siberian exile.
Three days after the eviction, I stood at the bottom of the cottage stairs with a clipboard in hand, verifying the final delivery of Margaret’s permitted belongings.
The front door of the cottage swung open, and Margaret appeared in the doorway, wearing a plain gray cardigan instead of her usual designer furs. Her face was tight, her lips pressed into a hard, unforgiving line.
“Are you here to gloat, Marcus?” she asked, her voice dry and brittle.
“I’m here to drop off your monthly grocery stipend and review the new household guidelines,” I replied evenly, walking up the steps and handing her a neatly typed envelope.
Margaret looked at the envelope as if it contained poison. “I am your mother. You cannot treat me like a tenant on probation.”
“You aren't on probation, Margaret. You’re on a budget,” I corrected her without raising my voice. “Three hundred dollars a week for groceries, utilities included, and zero charging privileges at local boutiques. Julian has already moved into his apartment near his new office in the city. He starts work on Monday.”
Margaret flinched at Julian’s name. For her, Julian working an ordinary forty-hour week under my supervision was the ultimate humiliation—a fall from grace so complete it felt like a physical blow.
“You broke him,” she whispered, staring down at the floorboards. “You took a boy who was meant for high society and turned him into a common clerk.”
“No, Margaret,” I said quietly. “I took a parasite and forced him to grow roots. Whether he survives or withers away depends entirely on the choices he makes from here on out. The same goes for you.”
May you like
I turned and walked back down the steps, leaving her standing alone in the doorway of the small apartment. For the first time in her life, silence wasn't a luxury she commanded; it was the only sound left in her world.
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