“Elena,” he said softly, like we were meeting over coffee instead of in the middle of my life detonating. “I’ve been trying to find you all morning.”

The woman beside Benedict gave a short, disgusted laugh. “No. You’ve been trying to stay close to the payout.”

Derek’s smile thinned.

I looked from one face to another and felt the room slipping away from me. “Somebody needs to explain what is happening.”

Benedict nodded once toward a small office behind the showroom. “Not here.”

“I’m not going anywhere with strangers.”

“You are not going anywhere with him,” the woman in the camel coat said, looking directly at Derek. “That much is settled.”

Her voice did something strange to me. Not because I knew it, exactly, but because it carried the same clipped cadence my mother sometimes had when she was frightened and pretending to be stern.

I looked at her. “Who are you?”

Her expression shifted—not softer, but sadder. “My name is Vivienne Mercer. I was your mother Catherine’s cousin.”

My knees weakened.

Not because I fully believed her.

Because I had seen her face before.

In my mother’s hidden photographs.

She had always been the woman half-cut out of the frame.

The one my mother refused to name.

The one beside another young woman with dark eyes and elegant posture and a smile so open it hurt to look at now.

My mother, Marjorie, used to take those photographs out only when she thought I was asleep. If I woke and saw them, she always tucked them away too quickly and said they were from “before things got bad.”

I had assumed she meant before poverty.

Now I wondered if she meant before the fire.

Ellis locked the front door and turned the sign to CLOSED without anyone asking him to. I almost admired that. He had the instincts of a man who knew when a room had stopped being commercial and become dangerous.

We went into the office.

I refused coffee, water, sympathy, and every attempt to make me comfortable. Derek tried to sit beside me. I moved my chair. Benedict took the seat across from me. Vivienne remained standing by the window like she trusted no one enough to put her back fully into a room.

“Start at the beginning,” I said. “And if anyone lies, I’m leaving.”

Benedict folded both hands over the handle of his cane. They were steady, but only just. “Twenty years ago, my daughter Catherine lived at Ash Vale Estate with her husband, Adrian Mercer, and their little girl, Isabella.”

He paused on the name.

My not-name.

“Adrian was in debt,” he continued. “Not ordinary debt. Hidden debt. Gambling, private loans, bad business bets. Catherine found out he had taken money from trust accounts and pledged portions of estate land as collateral without authority. She told him she was leaving. She planned to bring Isabella to me the next morning.”

Vivienne cut in, flat and cold. “He couldn’t allow that. Divorce would have exposed the theft, and custody would have put the child—and her trust—out of his reach.”

The word trust hung in the air.

Of course there was a trust.

In stories like this, there always is.

I almost laughed again, but the sound would have broken into something uglier.

“So there was a fire,” I said.