Charlie looks at me, taking me in. “I don’t think you know what you’re doing. I think you’re still hoping for a happy ending. But this story doesn’t end well,” he says. “It can’t.”

“I know it can’t. I’m just hoping for something else.”

“What’s that?”

I pause. “That it doesn’t end here.”

On the Lake

Charlie drives.

We head northwest of the city past Mount Bonnell and into Texas Hill Country. Suddenly I’m surrounded by rolling hills, trees and foliage everywhere, the lake muted outside the car windows, tepid. Unmoving.

The rain abates as we turn down Ranch Road. Charlie doesn’t say much, but he tells me that his parents bought their Mediterranean estate nestled on the shores of the lake a couple of years ago—the year Nicholas got out of prison, the year before his mother died. This was his mother’s dream house, he says, this private retreat, but Nicholas has stayed there since her death, on his own. I learn later that it cost them a cool ten million dollars—this estate which, as I see on a plaque at the foot of the driveway, Charlie’s mother, Meredith, named THE SANCTUARY.

It is easy to see why she has chosen this name. The estate is enormous, wildly beautiful, and private. Entirely private.

Charlie enters a code and the metal gates open to reveal a cobblestone driveway, at least a quarter of a mile long, that slowly winds its way to a small guardhouse. The guardhouse is covered in vines, making it inconspicuous.

The main house is less inconspicuous. It looks like it belongs on the French Riviera—complete with cascading balconies, an antique-tile roof, a stone facade. Most notable are the gorgeous bay windows running at least eight feet tall, welcoming you, inviting you in.

We pull up to the guardhouse and a bodyguard emerges. He is pro-linebacker huge, dressed in a tight suit.

Charlie unrolls the window as the bodyguard bends down, leans against the driver’s-side window. “Hiya, Charlie,” he says.

“Ned. How you doing tonight?”

Ned’s eyes move in my direction and he gives me a small nod. Then he turns back to Charlie. “He’s expecting you,” he says.

He taps on the car’s hood and then goes back into the guardhouse to open a second gate.

We pull through it, drive onto the circular driveway, and stop by the front door.

Charlie puts the car in park and shuts off the ignition. But he doesn’t move to get out of the car. It seems he wants to say something. He must change his mind though—or think better of it—because, without a word, he opens the driver’s-side door and gets out.

I follow his lead and step out of the car into the cool night, the ground slick from the rain.