Chapter 199: Aurielle DuVall

With nothing else to uncover in Nerissa’s bedroom, I searched the rest of the house. My parents’ room was the only one untouched, the bed still made, the walls bare, the space free of the suffocating obsession I had just witnessed upstairs. It looked almost normal, which in itself was strange, like a stage set where someone had cleaned up for show.

But I know the truth. This just meant that no one had slept in the room in weeks.

I ended up in the living room, sinking into the couch to wait. The house was heavy with silence, broken only by the occasional creak of wood as the sun slipped lower in the sky. When the door finally opened around five, my mother stumbled in, dragging my father by the arm.

He was drunk. The stench hit before I even saw his face. She dropped him by the center table like a sack of flour, disgust clear in the stiffness of her movements, then stormed into the kitchen with the meager bag of groceries she’d managed to bring back.

I looked at him with nothing but an