Trapped With My Husband's Cruel Brother

The Uber driver didn't even apologize.

He just stopped the car at the edge of a two-lane road that disappeared into black trees, popped my suitcase out of the trunk, and said, "GPS dies out here. Road's too narrow anyway. You're close enough." Then he was gone, taillights shrinking to two red dots and then nothing, and I was standing alone on the shoulder of a highway in the Adirondacks at eleven-something at night with a rolling suitcase and a coat that was absolutely right for a Manhattan April and absolutely wrong for this one.

Colton had said the lake house was easy to find.

Colton said a lot of things.

I walked. The gravel road was uneven and my suitcase wheel caught every rock like it had a personal grudge. The trees pressed in close on both sides, and the cold wasn't the polite kind of cold you feel waiting for a cab on Fifth Avenue. It had teeth. It got inside my collar and down my sleeves and by the time the tree line opened up and I saw the dark shape of the cabin sitting at the edge of the water, my fingers had gone from numb to not there at all.

I saw the orange flare first.

A cigarette, burning on the porch.

I stopped walking. My suitcase rolled one more half-rotation and stopped with me.

There was a man sitting on the porch steps. He had Colton's jaw and Colton's shoulders, that same broad, unhurried build, but nothing else about him was Colton. Colton was soft in the way that money makes people soft, rounded at the edges, always slightly underdressed for the weather because he never had to worry about consequences. This man was none of that. He was still in the way that things are still when they're deciding something. When the cigarette flared again, it lit his eyes for just a second — gray, or maybe green, it was too dark to tell — and whatever color they were, they had already taken me apart and put me back together before I'd taken another step.

He wasn't surprised to see me.

That was the part that made my stomach drop.

He stood, and the movement was unhurried in a way that felt almost deliberate, like time worked differently for him. He dropped the cigarette and crushed it under his boot. Then he walked down the porch steps.

"You're Harper." Not a question.

His voice was lower than Colton's. Rougher. Like something that had been worn down by weather or silence or both.

"Colton didn't—"

"Tell you I was here. I know." He reached out and took my suitcase handle. I hadn't said yes. My hand was still on it. For one strange second we were both holding it, and then he just walked, pulling it with him toward the door, and I stood there with my empty hand in the cold air.

He didn't look back.

I looked at the road behind me. Two miles back to the highway. Zero bars on my phone. The nearest neighbor, I'd find out later, was twelve miles away.

I followed him inside.

---

The cabin was nothing like the photos Colton had texted me. Those had been taken in summer, all golden light and lake views. What I walked into was low ceilings and pine floors that groaned under every step and furniture that looked like it had been bought in 1987 and never reconsidered. The only light came from a fireplace in the far wall, and it threw everything into amber and shadow.

The man — Colton's brother, it had to be, the resemblance was too specific to be anything else — moved to the kitchen without turning on a light. I heard the clink of glass. He came back with two fingers of something dark in a short glass and set it on the table in front of me.

"Drink it. Your lips are purple."

I didn't touch the glass. "I need to call Colton."

"No signal."

"Wi-Fi, then. I can use—"

"There's no Wi-Fi." He leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, watching me with an expression that gave nothing away. "Your husband sent you up here to rest. Not to scroll through your phone."

The way he said *your husband* — it wasn't neutral. It wasn't hostile, exactly. It was something more controlled than either of those things, like he'd decided a long time ago what he thought about Colton and had since stopped thinking about it.

"You're Sterling," I said.

He didn't confirm it. He didn't need to.

"Colton said you disappeared. Six years ago."

"Seven." Something crossed his face, quick and gone. "He was never good at math."

"Where did you—"

"I'm not doing this." He pushed off the counter and nudged the glass closer to me. "Drink. You walked two miles in that coat. You're not scared — if you were scared you'd still be standing on the road. You're shaking because you're cold, and because your husband didn't tell you to pack for actual winter, and because you've been running on adrenaline since the car dropped you off and it's starting to wear out."

Every word was accurate. That was the unsettling part. A threat would have been easier to process than this — this precise, unhurried reading of me, like he'd done it before I'd even opened my mouth.

I picked up the glass and drank.

The bourbon hit the back of my throat and burned all the way down, and I felt my shoulders drop about two inches. The shaking slowed.

Sterling watched me set the glass down. Then he said, "Two bedrooms upstairs. I'm in the right one. You're in the left. The wall between them is thin." A pause, brief and flat. "You'll hear me. I'll hear you. If that's a problem, the couch is closer to the fire."

I thought about it for exactly three seconds.

"I'll take the bedroom."

---

The bedroom was cold. The blankets smelled faintly of cedar and something older — not unpleasant, just the smell of a place that had been closed up through a long winter. I pulled both of them over me and stared at the ceiling and listened to the fire downstairs slowly lose its voice.

The door didn't lock. I'd noticed that right away, the little button in the center of the knob that turned but didn't catch. I looked at the wooden chair in the corner for a long moment. Then I got up, carried it across the room, and wedged it under the handle.

From the other side of the wall, I heard it — faint, low, almost nothing.

A sound like someone trying not to laugh.

He'd heard every bit of it.

I got back into bed and pulled the blankets up and told myself it didn't matter. He was Colton's estranged brother. He was strange and too quiet and he looked at me like he was solving an equation. None of that was my problem. I was here for two weeks. I would rest, like Colton wanted. I would not think about the apartment, or the fight, or the thing I'd found in Colton's jacket pocket three weeks ago that I still hadn't decided what to do with.

I closed my eyes.

Then I opened them.

The wall beside my bed had a crack in it — a thin, dark line where the old wood had pulled apart over years of winters. Light moved through it, faint and amber, the last of the fire in Sterling's room.

I don't know why I looked. I'd tell myself later it was just instinct, just curiosity, just the particular alertness of being somewhere unfamiliar.

I pressed my eye to the gap.

Sterling was sitting on the edge of his bed, his back mostly to me, his head bent. His hands were in his lap, and he was holding something. Not a phone — the shape was wrong, too rigid, too flat. A photograph. He held it the way you hold something you've held a thousand times before, worn soft at the edges from handling.

His hands were shaking.

Not the small tremor of cold. A real shake, the kind that comes from somewhere deep and unsteady, the kind a person works very hard to hide when anyone else is in the room.

This man who had looked at me like nothing could touch him.

His hands were shaking.

I pulled back from the wall and lay flat on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and I did not look again.