Chapter 3 - Eleven Months of Lies
Adrian shut the library doors and spread the note on his desk. The E leaned backward. The final e curled like a tiny hook. Evelyn's handwriting, down to the impatient slash through her t.
Marcus paced. “Someone is playing a sick joke.”
“Who had access to her body?”
“The hospital. The funeral home. You know this.”
“I know what I was told.”
Rosa stood by the window, twisting her necklace. Sophie slept on the couch beneath Adrian's coat.
“Rosa,” Adrian said quietly, “if you love that child, stop protecting whoever did this.”
“I was protecting her.”
“From whom?”
Rosa looked at Marcus. He stopped pacing.
“Tell him,” she said.
Marcus's voice turned flat. “You don't understand what you're asking.”
Adrian moved between his brother and the door. “Try me.”
Rosa drew a breath. “The woman in the coffin wasn't Evelyn.”
The clock ticked three times before Adrian could speak.
“Then whose body did I bury?”
Rosa had arrived at the Vale house when Adrian was six. She taught him to knot his tie, kept bandages in her apron pocket, and once walked through a blizzard to pick him up when Richard forgot him at school. He had trusted her with Sophie more completely than he'd trusted anyone. Now she sat across from him as if waiting for a sentence.
'Why didn't you tell me?' he asked. Rosa stared at her hands. 'Because they told me they had Elena. Because every time I thought about calling you, someone left a photograph of my grandson outside my apartment.' Adrian's anger had nowhere to go. He remembered handing Rosa a sympathy card after her daughter supposedly moved overseas for work. Rosa had accepted it with a smile so thin it should have frightened him.
Adrian took out his phone and opened the photographs from Evelyn's funeral. There was Marcus beside the coffin, directing the staff, keeping Adrian away from the viewing room. There was Sloane speaking to a physician Adrian couldn't name. There was Rosa at the back, bent almost double, while everyone assumed she was mourning her employer. Adrian zoomed in on her face and felt sick. She hadn't been watching the coffin. She'd been watching Marcus.
May you like
He laid the phone down gently. 'Rosa, whatever you did to survive, tell me now. I won't make Sophie pay for another secret.'
Rosa shut her eyes. “My daughter.”
