They stood grouped together in custom-tailored coats, smelling of cigars, expensive scotch, and rain, laughing softly among themselves like men who had just won a local golf tournament.
As I walked toward them, the eldest brother, Marcus—a broad-shouldered brute who managed the family’s construction sites—stepped forward.
He wiped a fleck of dried blood from his knuckle with a silk handkerchief and smirked.
“Look who finally showed up,” Marcus sneered, his voice echoing off the hospital tiles.
“The dutiful little husband.
Maybe next time you’ll teach your wife how to listen to her elders, Adrian.
She always had a big mouth.”
Julian, the third brother, chuckled, taking a sip from a paper coffee cup.
“She slipped down the studio stairs, Adrian.
Terrible accident.
Tragic, really.”
Arthur Montgomery stepped to the front.
He was sixty-two years old, with silver hair brushed back neatly, wearing an overcoat that cost more than most people earned in a month.
