Summary
A matrimonial inferno ignites when Jim Brood’s corrosive suspicion scorches the air of his once-roseate household; Margaret, the luminous wife whose gaze once held galaxies, snatches up the shards of her dignity and flees, leaving her infant son Fred as collateral damage in the smoldering ruins. She seeks refuge with Theresa—her spectral mirror-image, a wan invalid whose lungs rattle like paper cranes—until a baroque baron, hungry for an heir, offers to crown the dying twin as his dynasty’s final jewel. Death, ever the opportunist, swipes Theresa away mid-transaction, and Margaret, tasting the iron of desperation, slips into the vacant skin of the deceased, stitching herself into a new identity with threads of guilt and silk. Two decades of borrowed breath later, the fates orchestrate a danse macabre: Jim, now silvered and oblivious, woos the woman he once tormented, beguiled by the stranger who is still his wife. Margaret, starved for the child she relinquished, accepts the proposal, embedding herself in the household where her own son—now a restless young man—flirts with the shadow of an Oedipal storm. Jim’s jealousy, that old famished wolf, reawakens, convinced that the woman he twice-married is tangled in carnal sin with the boy who shares his blood but not his name. Gunfire splits the night; Fred crumples, crimson blooming on linen like poppies in a killing field. Maternal instinct erupts through Margaret’s porcelain façade; she rushes to the fallen youth, her lament a siren that finally shatters Jim’s cataract of ignorance. Recognition crashes over him like a biblical flood: the wife, the impostor, the mother, the same. In the wavering aftermath of smoke and confession, the triad clings together, scarred yet strangely salvaged, as if the bullet had pierced not flesh but the festering abscess of their shared past.
Synopsis
Jim Brood's insane jealousy drives his wife Margaret away, forcing her to leave her son Fred behind and go to live with her twin sister Theresa, an invalid. When a rich baron wishes to adopt Theresa as his daughter, Theresa dies and Margaret assumes her identity. Twenty years later, Margaret and Jim meet again. Not realizing that she is his first wife, Jim proposes to Margaret and she marries him to be near her son. Jim's jealousy rages when he suspects Margaret of having an affair with Fred, in his anger, he shoots and wounds his son. When Margaret can no longer conceal her motherly concern for the wounded Fred, Jim discovers her true identity and the three are reconciled.
