Chapter 2
The door shut. Adrian didn’t move toward her. He didn’t need to.
“Three years,” he said. “Three years you’ve cleaned this house, and you never once looked at that hallway like it was anything.”
Nora held the frame against her chest.
“I looked at it every day.”
“Then why now.”
“Because tonight you told seven women they could take whatever they wanted.” She lifted her chin. “I finally believed you meant it.”
Adrian stepped closer. Close enough that she caught the cedar on his collar.
“That frame is worth eleven dollars,” he said. “You could have had the choker. The car. The Basquiat.”
“I don’t want your money.”
“Then what do you want.”
Nora didn’t answer right away. Her thumb traced the cracked edge of the wood, careful, almost reverent.
“I want you to know what’s really inside it.”
Adrian’s expression didn’t change. But his hand, resting on the doorframe, curled into a fist.
“There’s nothing inside it. It’s a photograph of my mother.”
“There’s more than a photograph.”
Silence. The kind that has weight.
“How would you know that.”
Nora finally looked up at him, and for the first time in three years, there was no deference in her eyes. Only certainty.
“Because my mother told me before she died.”
Adrian went still in a way that frightened her more than his anger ever could.
She turned the frame over with careful hands, fingers finding a seam along the backing that no one — not even Adrian — had ever noticed. A thin fold of paper, yellowed and brittle, slid free.
Adrian’s breath caught.
“That’s my mother’s handwriting.”
“I know,” Nora said. “She wrote it before she died. And she wrote your mother’s name right after mine — because my mother worked in this house before I was born.”
Adrian took the letter from her hands like it might turn to ash.
His eyes moved down the page. Stopped. Moved again, slower.
“‘Tell her son the truth when he’s ready to hear it,'” he read aloud, his voice unsteady in a way Nora had never heard from him. “‘Someone in this family wanted him dead. Someone still does.'”
He looked up, and something in his face had cracked open completely.
May you like
“Who is she talking about.”
Nora hesitated. For three years she had guarded a secret that wasn’t hers to give away — one that had nothing to do with money, and everything to do with who she really was.
