Chapter 1 - The Woman by the Blue Curtains
"Daddy, that's Grandma. Why is she dressed like a maid?"
Adrian Ward stopped walking in the middle of his own wedding reception.
His six-year-old daughter, Ivy, stood beside him in a lavender dress, pointing across a ballroom full of white roses and crystal chandeliers. At the far end, an older woman in a navy housekeeping uniform stood near the blue curtains, her hands locked together so tightly that her knuckles had gone pale.
Adrian knew those eyes.
He had last seen them through the rear window of a car when he was eight years old.
"Ivy," he said, hearing the roughness in his voice, "who told you that woman was your grandmother?"
"Mommy did. Before she went to heaven." Ivy tugged at his sleeve. "She said Grandma Lena loved you even when you couldn't see her. Sometimes Grandma read to me at the library. She makes the bunny voice funny."
Around them, the wedding guests fell silent. Adrian's bride, Celia Hart, stopped halfway through raising her champagne glass.
"Adrian," Celia said with a bright, brittle smile, "this isn't the time. Someone has obviously confused your daughter."
The older woman took one step forward.
"No," she whispered. "She hasn't."
Adrian's father, Preston Ward, came out of the crowd so fast that he nearly knocked over a waiter.
"Security," Preston snapped. "Remove that woman. Now."
Lena flinched at his voice. Adrian noticed it: the involuntary movement of someone whose body remembered danger before her mind could name it.
"Nobody touches her," Adrian said.
Preston spun. "Son, she's a trespasser."
"Then tell me why she looks like the woman in the only photograph of my mother you didn't burn."
Preston's face went gray.
Ivy pulled her hand out of Adrian's and crossed the marble floor. She threw her arms around the older woman's waist. Lena bent over the child, crying without making a sound.
"You promised you'd come to my birthday," Ivy murmured.
"I tried, sweetheart."
Adrian stared at them. He'd believed his mother dead for twenty-nine years. Until eighteen, he'd put flowers on her grave every Mother's Day.
"If you're Lena Ward," he said, "whose grave have I been visiting?"
Lena looked past him at Preston.
"Ask your father," she said. "And whatever you do, Adrian, don't sign the papers he's put in your wedding suite."
Preston lifted a hand toward the security guards.
May you like
Then Lena said the words that stopped him cold.
"Because the last man who signed for him died in the Ash Street fire."
