Chapter 1: The Longest Winter
The beep of the heart monitor was the only music in the master bedroom of the sprawling Thorne Estate. Outside, the Montana wind howled, stripping the last leaves from the cottonwood trees, but inside, the air was stagnant, smelling of antiseptic and old paper. I sat in the corner, watching my father, Robert, dip a washcloth into a basin of warm water.
He wrung it out with gentle, calloused hands—hands that had built fences, fixed engines, and now, tended to the dying man in the bed. “Dad,” I whispered. “You should sleep.
Uncle Ben is taking the next shift.”
“I’m fine, David,” my father replied, his voice raspy from exhaustion. He wiped Grandfather’s forehead. “He likes it when I’m here.
He sleeps better.”
Grandfather Elias Thorne was a Titan of industry. He had built a logistics empire from a single truck. He was a man of iron will and terrifying standards.
He had five children: Richard, the eldest, a Wall Street shark; Sarah, a socialite in Los Angeles; Evelyn, who married into European nobility; Ben, a high school history teacher; and my father, Robert, who ran the local hardware store in town. For the last six months, as cancer ate away at the Titan, the house had been quiet. Richard sent expensive flowers.
Sarah sent a hired nurse (whom Grandfather fired within an hour). Evelyn sent long, poetic emails about “spiritual transitions.”
But only my father and Uncle Ben were here. They rotated shifts, changed his sheets, fed him ice chips, and listened to his delirious ramblings about business deals from 1975.
The door creaked open. Uncle Ben walked in, holding two steaming mugs of coffee. He looked ragged, his cardigan buttoned wrong.
“The snow is piling up,” Ben whispered. “Roads might close.”
“Let them close,” my father said, taking the coffee. “It’s not like anyone is coming.”
Grandfather stirred.
His eyes, usually sharp as flint, were milky now. He looked at my father, then at Ben. “Boys,” he croaked.
“We’re here, Pop,” Ben said, rushing to the bedside. “Where are… the others?”
My father hesitated. He hated lying.
“They’re… they’re trying to get here, Pop. The weather.”
Grandfather let out a sound that might have been a laugh or a cough. “Weather.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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