Safe?

Chapter 3

Four days passed. We didn’t cry, we didn’t shout, we just held onto one another in complete silence as tightly as we could. 

It was like everything had frozen around us. We were numb.

On the fifth day, Doctor Malone gave us an ultimatum.

We either, snapped out of it and started feeding ourselves again, or he would have to treat us for depression.

“We’re not fucking depressed!” Ben had snapped at him. “We’re angry!”

The man had smiled and then muttered an annoying “Good!” before demanding we eat properly from now on. He then had another bed set up in the room for Ben, “in case you don’t start putting weight back on…”

However, my brother ignored whatever the older man’s intents had been, and insisted that he wouldn’t sleep on it unless they pushed it against mine so that he could hold my hand.

We thus started eating again, and showering, after we overheard a nurse telling one of her colleagues how she hated going to stinking twins’ room.

Inspector Forbes had come daily to inform us of all the new developments.

It wasn’t long before the media got involved, and after a zealous journalist wearing a nurse uniform made it to our room in the middle of the night, he made sure we had two uniformed agents watching our door at all time to prevent any more incident.

Apparently, the poor Sterling twins were all people would talk about, with their crazy mother and psychopath of a father. Add their murderers to the equation and you had all the ingredients for an action packed thriller.

You should have seen how excited the journalist had been when she finally stood in front of us with her recorder.

“So how does it feel to know that your father was in fact a liar, and that his company was mainly used to launder money coming from drug trafficking and prostitution?”

I thought that Ben would kill her when he finally got out of his initial surprise. Fortunately, a nurse had arrived and had immediately notified security.

When the Inspector had come to check on us a few hours later, Ben had demanded to read the diary arguing that we needed to know the whole truth if we wanted to be able to move on. After a long discussion, the older man had finally accepted.

It took us a whole day to finish it. It was a hell of a painful read.

Our father had strangled his parents to death after having drugged their tea. He had then placed them in the rocking chairs where they usually napped in the afternoon, before starting a fire with his father’s pipe.

It had looked like an accident, so the local Sheriff never suspected anything.

He had always had a very difficult relationship with his parents.

His father had brought him up expecting he would take over the farm, but he despised his lower class origins and would start fights at school whenever somebody would call him a peasant.

He had thus decided to study hard to be able to escape that life he hated with all his might, and he had succeeded in getting a full scholarship for NYU.

After the success of Sterlingtown, the small town he conceived on his family’s land, he started living the luxury life he’d always dreamt of.

He met our mother at a charity dinner and they immediately hit it off.

She was gorgeous looking and would “look good” on his arm in future meetings and only expected a monthly allowance of 20000$ to smile and close her eyes to any of his dodgy businesses.