Daughter of Deep Silence Read Online Free PDF

had left things alone I wouldn’t have returned. Maybe if he’d just let the past stay the past, I’d have kept my fantasies of revenge tucked neatly away, never daring to brush them off and consider putting them into action.
    I’d moved on. Or at least I’d convinced Cecil I had. When he saw what my obsession with finding the attackers was doing to me—how it was only feeding the rage festering inside, he called off the search for the truth. Or rather, excluded me from it.
    He wanted me to have a normal life, the life his
real
daughter never had. And so we pretended, together. I pretended that I was okay. He pretended that the violent loss of his wife and daughter wasn’t slowly killing him. Both of us pretended we weren’t still searching for the attackers. School breaks became elaborate performances by the both of us, each playing our part for the other.
    Until he died seven months ago and I didn’t have to pretend anymore. But I’d tried—out of love and respect for Cecil and everything he’d done for me—I had tried to truly move on.
    The breaking point for me had been the movie. They’d made a documentary about the Senator’s rescue, its release perfectly timed to hit as his reelection campaign began heating up and the media started to speculate about whether the Senator had his eye on the presidency down the road.
    The movie had been everywhere: inescapable.
    In it, the Senator waxed on with great detail about the final moments of the ship. How fortunate it was that he and Grey had been up on deck at the time. The sound and fury of the wave as it approached. Experts weighed in with elaborate simulations of what must have happened when the rogue wave hit—all the possible ways the ship could have broken apart while it sank.
    As part of the dramatization they’d stuck the Senator and his son in a life raft and reenacted their rescue. It had been a complete farce—not even the tastefully ragged clothes they’d dressed them in could hide the healthy roundness of their cheeks, the paleness of their skin unmarred by sun-spawned blisters.
    Watching Grey’s face when they “spotted” their “rescuer” for the first time had made me violently ill. And as I knelt on the hard, cold tiles of my dorm’s bathroom I realized a new truth: I was done.
    I was done pretending to be okay. I was done attempting to move on. I was done trying to forget. I was done searching and finding nothing but dead ends. I was done being afraid of Senator Wells.
    I was done staying away from him.
    I’d spent four years struggling to find the truth and all I had were bits and pieces. Enough to know that Grey and his father hadn’t seemed to lie out of fear of the attackers coming after them. Yet not nearly enough to understand what that meant. To know what role they played.
    One thing is obvious: If there’s any truth left about the
Persephone
, it lies with Grey and Senator Wells. Perhaps our confrontation was always inevitable and that’s what Cecil had tried to keep me from by sending me off to boarding school in Switzerland and urging me to move on with my life.
    But how could he really understand that the only way for me to move forward is to go back?
    So I’d taken all of my elaborate revenge daydreams and began to boil them down into a single plan. Once I turned eighteen and had unfettered access to the trust funds I’d inherited from Cecil, I began to put that plan in motion, laying the groundwork. And now with graduation behind me, it’s time to go home and pull the trigger.
    The driver slows, putting on his blinker before turning down a long driveway lined with moss-draped oaks, their limbs gnarled from age and the constant barrage of salt-crusted breezes. I’ve seen pictures of the house, of course, but I’m still not prepared for the overall scope of it. It feels as though it belongs on a movie set with girls in tight corsets and hooped skirts.
    Fluted columns two stories high run along a wide front porch that