Chapter 8 - The Letter That Lied
Nora read the letter once and set the phone down before she crushed it.
“Lydia would never write that.”
Amina agreed not to assume the document was authentic. She wanted ink analysis, the original paper, and witnesses who could explain how the letter entered the archive.
Gideon stared at the signature. “It's her handwriting.”
“So was the note Ivy gave you,” Nora said. “One of them can be copied.”
Ivy touched Nora's arm. “Are they saying my first mom didn't want me with you?”
“No.” Nora looked directly at her. “I'm saying somebody wants you to believe that.”
Gideon asked to see where Lydia had died. Nora didn't want to go, but the crash report might contain answers. Mateo drove them to a stretch of the Taconic State Parkway where maple trees crowded the shoulder. Ivy remained at the hotel with a vetted childcare worker and two independent guards.
There was no memorial at the bend. Only a shallow ditch and a damaged guardrail that had been replaced years earlier.
“I should've answered,” Gideon said quietly.
Nora stood beside him. “You can't go back to that phone call.”
“No. But I can stop pretending I made one mistake. I let people persuade me Lydia was cruel and unstable because listening would have meant admitting I was wrong.”
He had called her difficult at their last dinner. She had called him a coward. Both had meant it.
Nora unfolded a copy of the accident report. Lydia's car had left the road at 9:41 p.m. The emergency call came at 10:07.
“Twenty-six minutes,” Nora said.
Gideon scanned the page. “That doesn't mean nobody saw it.”
“No. But read the witness line.”
It listed an anonymous caller whose number had been withheld. The caller claimed to have seen the crash happen.
Mateo joined them from the car. “I've got a retired dispatcher willing to talk. She worked that shift.”
“Where?” Gideon asked.
“Poughkeepsie. Her name's June Alvarez.”
Nora looked down into the ditch and imagined Lydia alone, bleeding, waiting for help that should have come sooner.
Mateo's phone chimed with another message from June.
May you like
He went very still.
“She says the person who called emergency services wasn't a passing driver,” he said. “It was someone sitting in Lydia's car.”
