Fourteen years of obedience to a dead woman’s wishes, conveyed by a living woman he had never questioned.
At the foot of the stairs, Vanessa blocked his path.
“Please. Before you go up—”
“Did you know about this?”
Her eyes flickered toward Elena.
That was enough.
Maxwell stepped back.
“What did you know?”
“Not everything.”
“Then start with something.”
Cecilia arrived behind them.
“Vanessa, say nothing.”
Her daughter went still.
Maxwell had never noticed how instantly Vanessa obeyed that voice.
Elena shifted the violin against her chest.
“She didn’t steal it,” Vanessa said suddenly.
A silence followed.
Maxwell frowned.
“Who said she did?”
Vanessa swallowed.
“Mother. In the service corridor. Before Elena came in.”
Cecilia laughed without warmth.
“A maid carrying an Anderson family instrument into a wedding. What conclusion would you draw?”
“It isn’t an Anderson instrument,” Elena said.
“It belonged to my father.”
For the first time, Cecilia looked directly at her.
And Elena, trembling visibly now, looked back.
“His name was Daniel Marlowe.”
Arthur sat down on the bottom stair.
Maxwell turned to him.
“What?”
The old man covered his mouth.
Elena’s voice remained quiet.
“He was the driver everyone said stole from your mother.”
Daniel Marlowe had worked at Blackthorn for eleven years.
He drove Eleanor to concerts, collected Maxwell from school, changed tires in freezing rain, and kept peppermints in the glove compartment.
Maxwell remembered him.
That realization arrived with a sickening little jolt.
He remembered the peppermints.
He remembered Daniel stopping on the coast road so a young Maxwell could help a stranded seal while his father complained about the delay.
But when the man vanished from the household, Maxwell had been away at boarding school. Cecilia told him Daniel had stolen jewelry and fled.
There had been no reason, in Maxwell’s comfortable young life, to wonder what happened afterward.
“He didn’t flee,” Elena said. “He was arrested.”
Maxwell stared at her.
“My mother had died the year before. He was all I had.”
The violin creaked faintly beneath her tightening hand.
“He wrote to me from prison every Sunday. He drew little birds in the margins because I was afraid I’d forget what his handwriting looked like.”
“Elena,” Cecilia said, with sudden softness. “You’ve clearly suffered. But this isn’t the place.”
“He died there.”
The words cut cleanly through the room.
“A man attacked him in the laundry. I was eleven.”
Maxwell looked toward the ballroom. Faces crowded the doorway, watching without pretending otherwise.
“Mother would never have—”
“Your mother found out he was innocent.”
He stopped.
“That’s why she brought me here.”
Elena wiped one cheek with the heel of her hand, almost impatiently.
“She said she had believed someone she shouldn’t have believed. She said she couldn’t give me my father back, but she could give me the truth.”
