Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Bear Mountain
Ten years earlier, before Chloe was a thought, before Liam had built his structural engineering consultancy, and before Marcus had inherited his family’s private equity firm, there was Bear Mountain.
It was November of our senior year at Columbia. It was the only time in Liam’s entire life that he had gotten behind the wheel after drinking. It was Marcus’s twenty-first birthday celebration at an off-grid cabin in upstate New York. Liam had consumed four whiskeys over five hours—hardly drunk by college standards, but technically over the legal limit. It had begun to sleet. When Marcus claimed he was having an acute appendicitis attack, doubled over on the floor and screaming in agony, Liam didn’t wait for an ambulance. He threw Marcus into the passenger seat of his beat-up Subaru and sped down the winding mountain pass through blinding sheets of black ice.
Three miles from the highway, on a hairpin turn known as Dead Man’s Curve, the car hit a patch of invisible slush. The steering wheel spun uselessly in Liam’s grip. The vehicle slammed into the wooden guardrail, spun across the median, and collided with a battered pickup truck parked halfway onto the shoulder.
Liam had hit his head against the steering wheel, dazed and bleeding. When his vision cleared, he smelled burning oil and anti-freeze. Marcus, suddenly upright and seemingly unbothered by his supposed appendicitis, had grabbed Liam by the collar and dragged him out of the driver's seat.
Twenty yards back, crushed against the trunk of a pine tree, was a dark silhouette. A local mechanic named Thomas Miller had been changing a flat tire on the shoulder.
Liam had tried to crawl back to the man, sobbing, screaming into the freezing wind, but Marcus had tackled him to the asphalt.
*“He’s dead, Liam! Look at him—his neck is broken!”* Marcus had hissed into his ear, his grip like iron. *“Smell your breath! You’re drunk! You’re twenty-one years old, you have a master’s fellowship lined up, and you’re going to spend twenty-five years in Sing Sing for vehicular manslaughter! Get in the passenger seat! GET IN!”*
Marcus had shoved Liam into the passenger side, taken the wheel, and gunned the engine. They fled into the storm.
Two days later, Marcus appeared at Liam’s dorm room. His demeanor had completely transformed from terrified frat boy to a cold, calculating savior. Marcus explained that he had used his father’s immense wealth and political connections to handle the fallout. The local police chief was a personal friend of the Drake family. Marcus claimed he had paid two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to alter the hit-and-run report, bribe the coroner to rule the death an accidental slip-and-fall down a ravine, and crush the state police inquiry before it ever reached the district attorney’s desk.
*“You owe me your life, Liam,”* Marcus had said that afternoon, tapping Liam’s chest with a single finger. *“You’re an engineer because of me. You’re not wearing an orange jumpsuit because of me. We don’t ever speak of this. But remember who holds the key to your cell.”*
Liam had carried that phantom corpse on his back for a decade. He had married me with that ghost standing between us at the altar. Every time he held Chloe, he looked down at his clean hands and saw the imaginary blood of Thomas Miller.
What Liam never knew—what Marcus had meticulously ensured he would never discover—was that the local newspaper had only printed a four-line obituary for Thomas Miller. Liam had been so traumatized, so sickened by his own cowardice, that he had never looked at the police archives. He had trusted Marcus completely.
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He believed he was a murderer walking free on borrowed time, entirely dependent on the mercy of a brother who held the noose around his neck.
***
