Chapter 2: The Chemist’s Daughter
Before I was ever a Bromel, I was an Ashworth. And long before I learned how to sit quietly in funeral parlors while people murmured rehearsed condolences, I learned how to balance chemical equations under the flickering fluorescent tubes of a public school laboratory.
I am thirty-six years old. For eleven years, I have taught Advanced Placement Chemistry to high schoolers in the East End of Richmond. Teenagers are turbulent, volatile mixtures of insecurity, raw potential, and hormonal chaos, but the periodic table does not lie to them. I teach them that if you introduce hydrochloric acid to sodium hydroxide, you will receive salt water and thermal release every single time. The universe does not negotiate. It does not pretend to love you while secretly planning your eviction. Stoichiometry is honest: the mass of your reactants will inevitably equal the mass of your products.
I crave that honesty because my childhood was built on things that were plain, solid, and paid for.
My mother succumbed to ovarian cancer when I was eight, leaving me in the care of my father, Arthur Ashworth. My father was a machinist who spent thirty-four years working at the locomotive yards near the James River. His fingernails were permanently stained with machine grease that no pumice soap could ever entirely lift, and he spoke only when the silence was truly intolerable.
Arthur Ashworth did not know how to buy fancy dresses, nor did he know how to braid hair without pulling, but he understood the absolute morality of unencumbered ownership. He saved every penny from every overtime shift, tucking the bills into rusted metal coffee cans before depositing them into conservative savings bonds. Two years before I met Thaddius, my father died in his sleep of an aortic aneurysm.
He left me two things.
The first was a modest, two-bedroom craftsman bungalow on a half-acre lot near the Henrico county line—a house with sturdy heart-pine floors, a brand-new slate roof, and a deed stamped with the word SATISFIED. Not a single nickel of mortgage remained.
The second was a four-acre parcel of timberland out past Hanover Court House. It was raw ground, thick with loblolly pines, wild blackberry brambles, and red Virginia clay. It had belonged to his grandfather, cleared with crosscut saws during the Great Depression. It produced no income, but the property taxes were fifty dollars a year, and it belonged to me. Free and clear. In my name alone.
“Keep what’s yours separate, Coraly,” my father had told me once while replacing the brake pads on my second-hand sedan. He hadn’t looked up from the rusted caliper. “A woman who owns her own ground doesn’t have to swallow anyone else’s dirt.”
I carried that advice into my marriage, not out of malice or suspicion, but out of the quiet, stubborn rhythm of my father’s blood. When Thad and I married at thirty, I kept my bank accounts at the credit union. When the county tax assessments arrived, I paid them from my teaching salary. It was a habit of self-preservation that I never bothered to interrogate.
I had met Thad Bromel at a charity benefit for the Richmond Public Library. He was thirty-four then, tall, with the effortless grace of old Virginia money. The Bromel family had owned and operated Bromel Funeral Home and Crematory since 1898. In a city obsessed with genealogy and historic cemeteries, a funeral family wasn’t just a business—it was an institution. The Bromels buried the judges, the state senators, the old tobacco barons, and the historic downtown clergy.
They traded in the currency of grief. They were masters of the quiet pause, the tasteful black silk necktie, the solemn nod of shared suffering. To a woman whose father had loved her in silence, Thad’s polished warmth felt like a roaring fireplace on a wet winter night. He listened to me. He brought me wildflowers picked from his mother’s manicured gardens. He told me that my intelligence was the most grounding thing he had ever encountered.
I was an orphan with a modest savings account and a steady public pension; he was the scion of a Monument Avenue dynasty. I believed, with the naive, desperate earnestness of a lonely woman, that I had been found.
The illusion began to fray within forty-eight hours of moving into the carriage house behind the Bromel ancestral estate.
The estate was presided over by Oteline Bromel, a woman who possessed the skeletal elegance of an antique silver candelabra. Oteline did not shout. She did not slam doors or utter vulgarities. Her cruelty was far more sophisticated; it was cloaked in the stifling, impenetrable armor of Southern hospitality.
“Oh, Coraly, sweetheart,” she would say, her voice dripping with powdered sugar as she surveyed the roast chicken I had prepared for Sunday supper. “How resourceful of you to use store-bought stock. In our family, of course, the cook always simmers the veal bones for twenty-four hours, but one can certainly appreciate the efficiency of… modern shortcuts.”
She would then smile, pat my forearm with cool, dry fingers, and quietly move the platter to the sideboard where nobody would touch it.
Every holiday was an exercise in invisible erasure. If I arranged the centerpiece, Oteline would adjust the magnolias by half an inch the moment my back was turned. If I spoke of my students during dinner, Marisol would lean back in her Chippendale chair, exchange a loaded, amused glance with her brother, and steer the conversation back toward the upcoming cotillion or the zoning dispute over the new chapel annex.
I was the stray they had permitted onto the veranda, provided I wiped my feet and remained out of the parlor when real company arrived.
Yet, I tried. God help me, how I broke myself against their stone. I spent three weeks’ salary finding a first-edition volume of Ellen Glasgow’s poetry for Oteline’s sixty-fifth birthday, only to discover it six months later in the mahogany donation bin by the service entrance. When the funeral home faced a cash-flow squeeze during an unusually mild winter, I quietly withdrew ten thousand dollars from my savings to float Thad’s commercial insurance premium, never asking for a promissory note.
I thought love was a ledger that could be balanced through sacrifice. I thought that if I only poured enough of my own marrow into their foundation, they would finally look at me and say: You are one of us.
Then, fourteen months ago, Oteline’s kidneys began to shut down.
