Chapter 8 - THE SEASIDE CITADEL
Following the corporate purge, Mark and Brooke refused to allow the fifty-million-dollar maritime trust to remain chained to boardroom politics.
Together with Diane, they chartered The Lily Vance Foundation for Maritime Youth & Nutrition—endowing it with twenty million dollars recovered from Richard's offshore accounts, dedicated to funding free healthy meals for underprivileged children of commercial fishermen and providing marine biology scholarships across New England.
To establish their permanent family sanctuary, Mark and Brooke purchased an expansive, historic eighty-acre coastal estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea: Cliffhaven.
The house was a magnificent, weathered cedar-shingle manor surrounded by ancient hemlocks, fragrant white cedars, and wild blueberry fields that sloped gently down to the churning blue waters of Massachusetts Bay. The air was clean, sharp with salt spray and evergreen, completely untainted by the suffocating pretensions of Boston high society.
The house had been completely customized for their family: wide French doors, vaulted ceilings of natural honey-pine, soaring windows that flooded every corridor with sunlight, and an expansive wraparound veranda overlooking the water.
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In the center of the kitchen, mounted right beside the spice rack above the professional range, hung the twelve-by-sixteen mahogany frame holding the famous photograph of Lily’s finger buried in the gold-leaf buttercream.
Every evening, the family would gather on the wide stone terrace to watch the sunset paint the Atlantic horizon in brilliant ribbons of coral, gold, and amethyst.
