“What’s the matter?” Jack asked, brushing her shoulder with the pad of his big thumb as soon as the others were out of sight. “I think I’m wondering why I’m still here,” she said, folding her arms and looking away. There was a crack in the wall; she looked at that. “If you want to […]

“Oh goody,” Brooke said flatly as she stared at the news footage playing on the great room’s enormous screen. “We’re on TV.” Before them was a live feed from one of the helicopters as it slowly loitered about the airspace above the island. They had the entire house in the camera’s sights, as well as […]

Brooke had a hard time falling asleep. She tossed and turned, asked Amos for another nightcap, drank it down, and tossed and turned some more. But eventually she settled into an uneasy sleep, and when she woke up the next morning, she felt like she’d been hit by a bus. The clock on the nightstand […]

Brooke was left with the thought for the next hour as Jack continued to fill in his lawyer. “Care about… someone else?” she murmured to herself as she chewed on the end of the pen and spun around in the chair. The young woman’s stomach felt tight as she thought about it. As she thought […]

Brooke was almost done cleaning the room when she was notified of her father calling the house. The Amos unit had started helping by taking the old clothes, which were well on their way to becoming little carpets of moss and fungi, and putting them into garbage bags, when it paused and looked her way. […]

“…my god,” Jack’s lawyer said as she approached the house. He and Brooke were waiting anxiously at the front entrance; he was pacing and rubbing at his scratchy chin. “Jack?” “It’s, ah… good to see you, Michelle,” the giant Russian said with a smile that looked a little more like a wince. The woman, dressed […]

Jack had found a bottle of something and was guzzling it down like water. “My lawyer should be here in a couple of hours,” he said, running a nervous hand through his chin-length hair. “She dropped everything to see me.” “She’s a good lawyer, yeah?” “Very good. She’s helped me with everything from libel to […]