Chapter 10: Her Final Words

Chapter 10: Her Final Words

The walk back to his house was a pilgrimage. The sun was just beginning to bleed over the horizon, casting the mist in shades of bruised purple and pale orange, but Leo saw none of it. His entire world had shrunk to the small, water-warped book in his hands. It felt impossibly heavy, a leaden weight of unspoken words and stolen years. Buster met him at the door, not with a wagging tail, but with a low, anxious whine, nudging his nose against the hand holding the diary as if he could sense the profound sorrow it contained.

Leo didn't bother with coffee. He went straight to the kitchen table, the epicenter of his investigation. He cleared a space, pushing aside his own frantic notes and the cold, clinical copy of her file. He placed the diary in the center, a relic on an altar. For a moment, he just stared at it, at the peeling leather and the tarnished green brass of the clasp. He was about to violate a lifetime of privacy, to read the last, most intimate thoughts of a murdered woman. It felt like a desecration, but it was also the only path to her salvation.

With the delicate precision of a bomb disposal expert, he worked a thin knife blade under the clasp. It gave way with a soft, metallic sigh, the sound of a secret finally surrendering. He opened the cover. The first few pages were stuck together with damp, and the paper was as fragile as a dead leaf. The ink, a graceful, looping cursive written in a faded blue-black, was blurred in places, but legible. He turned to the first entry.

October 12th, 1955. Alistair gave me this journal today. He said a woman of my standing should record her thoughts. He is so attentive. Sometimes, his attention feels like a spotlight, and I fear I will forget my lines. But then he smiles, and the entire world feels safe. Today he also gave me the most beautiful dressing gown, the color of a twilight sky. He says it matches my eyes. When I wear it, I feel like a queen in our castle on the hill.

Leo’s throat tightened. The pale blue gown. Not a uniform of madness, but a gift of love, now a rotting shroud. He read on, his fingers carefully separating the stiff, delicate pages. The early entries were a portrait of a hopeful, intelligent woman deeply in love, but threaded with a subtle, growing unease.

November 7th, 1955. Alistair was furious tonight. I spoke too long with Mr. Henderson at the mayor’s dinner. He said I was embarrassing him, making a spectacle of myself. When we got home, he grabbed my arm so tightly. The look in his eyes… it wasn't my Alistair. It was a stranger. My arm is bruised this morning, a dark purple bloom beneath the skin. He apologized, of course. He brought me flowers and promised it would never happen again. He said his passion for me sometimes gets the better of him.

The entries chronicled a descent into a private hell. Alistair Hemlock, the town benefactor, was a monster behind the closed doors of the estate. Leo read about shattering plates, of vicious, whispered insults that chipped away at her soul, of nights spent locked in her room. And then, the doctor arrived.

January 22nd, 1956. Alistair’s friend, Dr. Crane, came to visit again. Alistair told him I’ve been having my “spells.” Dr. Crane is so calm, so reassuring. He says many women of my temperament suffer from nerves. He gave me a new tonic. It makes my head feel full of cotton, and the world seems very far away. Alistair is so pleased when I take it. He holds my hand and tells me what a good wife I am, being so sensible about my condition.

Leo felt a surge of nausea. It wasn't just a cover-up after the fact. It was a conspiracy from the beginning. Dr. Crane wasn't an impartial physician; he was Alistair’s accomplice, medicating a victim into docile submission, professionally sanctioning the gaslighting, building the case for her "instability" brick by brick.

The diary became a testament to Elara's strength, not her fragility. She began to fight back. She documented every bruise, every threat. She recorded the dates of Dr. Crane's visits and the effects of his "tonics." She wasn't succumbing to madness; she was meticulously building a case against her captors.

May 28th, 1956. He knows. I don’t know how, but he knows I plan to leave. I have the letters he wrote to his mistress hidden. I have the train ticket to my sister’s in Ohio. But the kindness has returned, and that is more terrifying than the rage. He brought me breakfast in bed. He told me he has arranged a special rest for me, a place in the country where I can get well. I recognized the name on the letterhead he left on his desk. The Blackwood Asylum. Dr. Crane is the director. It is not a sanctuary. It is a cage.

Leo’s hands were shaking as he turned the page. He knew what came next. The asylum. The file. The fall. But there was one last entry. The handwriting was different—hasty, jagged, the ink smudged as if by tears or rain. The date was June 2nd, 1956. The day before her murder.

I am hiding this in the wall. Our wall. The one we walked by on our first courtship. A bitter irony. If you are reading this, it means I did not make it out. Alistair is bringing me to the asylum tomorrow morning. He says Dr. Crane is expecting me. He says everything will be fine. He smiles, but his eyes are made of ice. I can hear him walking in the hall outside my door. He is not going to let me leave. He is not going to let me speak. This book is all I have left. It is the only part of me that is still free. My name is Elara Hemlock. And I am not mad.

The entry ended there. A defiant, terrified testament from the edge of the abyss.

Leo closed the diary, his movements slow and deliberate. The room was silent. The morning sun streamed through the window, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. The world outside was unchanged, but inside Leo Vance, a tectonic shift had occurred.

The spectral woman who had terrorized him, who had ripped his life apart and driven him to the brink of insanity, was gone. In her place was Elara. A woman of courage and intelligence, who had loved a twilight-blue dressing gown, who had fought a monster, and who had been silenced. Her ghost wasn't a curse; it was a cry for help. Her terrifying decay wasn't a threat; it was a roadmap of her murder, a physical manifestation of the evidence they tried to bury.

He looked at the rotted diary in his hands, then at the official file lying beside it. The lie and the truth. The weapon and the motive. Julian Hemlock's cold, threatening face flashed in his mind. Some holes, once dug, are impossible to climb out of.

A cold, hard fury settled in Leo's soul, extinguishing the last embers of his fear. They hadn't just killed Elara. They had tried to obliterate her, to erase her very existence and replace it with the fiction of a madwoman. They had failed. Her voice was now in his hands, her story was in his head, and her unyielding will was at his back.

He was no longer running from a ghost. He was fighting for one. And he would tear the Hemlock legacy down to its foundations to give her the justice she had been denied.