The Face of the Seal by Jennifer Cumiskey

Author:Jennifer Cumiskey [Cumiskey, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Windchime Press, LLC
Published: 2019-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Normandy, present day

The small villa perched on a white-chalked cliff a mere few meters away from the edge which dropped thirty feet down to the sandy beach. The locals called it Maison Suspendu—the hanging house. Built in the seventeenth century, the stone and wood structure was a humble two-story box, but the enormous balcony on the second floor jutted out which rendered the optical illusion of a house precariously suspended on the edge of a cliff.

To Gerel, it was a safe haven.

The villa had been in the Garnier family for generations. Fifteen years ago, Gerel had her last words with her father and then left his grand apartment in Paris. Since then, Maison Suspendu belonged to her.

Gerel still remembered that it had been two days before her eighteenth birthday. Her father had said to her, “What would you like for your birthday? We have to celebrate, you’ll officially be an adult in two days.”

Except for the adult part, he’d said the same thing every year around her birthday for the past nine years since Gerel’s mother had died. And every year, Gerel answered her father the same way, “I don’t want anything, I want the truth.”

“Not that again, Gerel. I’ve told you, your maman suffered from depression for a long time. It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain and we don’t know exactly why it happened.”

“You killed her, Father. Maman was sad because you abandoned her.”

“How dare you talk to me like that!” her father flared. “I loved your mother and she had everything she needed and wanted.”

“I saw you. I saw you kissing a woman in front of this very apartment building, and she was certainly not maman,” Gerel had released the words that had been fighting to come out for years. She wanted them to be as hurtful to her father as possible. Maybe it had something to do with her being officially an adult in two days. She wanted her father to do the same: grow up.

“I did no such thing. And stop yelling, you’ll wake up your brother and Isabell.”

“Isabell is the woman you had affair with when you were still married to maman.” Gerel bore a contemptuous stare at her father and retreated to her own room.

When night fell, her father somehow manned up. He told her the truth, maybe not the whole truth, but Gerel got the gist. To this day, she’d never been able to forgive her father.

It turned out that Gerel’s grandfather wasn’t too hot about Emilee Gardner, the American archeology student his future-neurosurgeon son, René Garnier, had fallen madly in love with. “Son, you’re ruining your future, you won’t be happy with that girl,” he warned after he’d met his future daughter-in-law. Of course, René didn’t heed his old man’s warning. The love birds went to the family villa in Normandy one weekend and came back married. Grandfather Garnier was furious. “How are you going to fix people’s brains when your own is deranged? Are you planning to have kids?

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