Chapter 192: Where the Water Must Stay Calm
20 hours earlier:
After Micah slammed the car door and walked away without looking back, Clyde just sat there. For ten long minutes, he didn’t move. His hands rested on the steering wheel, but his fingers didn’t grip. His eyes didn’t blink. He sat like someone had sucked his soul away.
When the silence in the car became too heavy to bear, he finally turned the key and started the engine.
He didn’t even know where he was going. The car rolled through the city without a destination. The roads twisted and turned under his tires. Eventually, he found himself somewhere familiar. A quiet slope. A row of trimmed hedges. The iron gates of a private cemetery stood open.
He chuckled bitterly.
He parked and stepped out, letting the cold wind slap his face.
His shoes crunched softly over gravel as he made his way through the rows of graves. It was quiet. The only sound was the wind brushing past trees and the distant chirp of birds.
Then, he found the section with the Du Pont name carved into a stone arch.
There they were, his ancestors. His blood. The names of men and women he had barely known but who had passed down everything to him: title, power, and the chaos that came with it.
His steps slowed when he reached the last row. His eyes landed on the three graves side by side. His parents.
His memory of his uncle, his biological father, was foggy at best. A smile here, a low voice there. His mother? Nothing. Just the knowledge of her name and face from a photograph. They were strangers to him.