“Did you bring me here?”

“No.” Her voice broke. “I saw you on the stairs your first morning. You looked so like Arthur’s sister that I thought I was dreaming.”

“I arranged the placement.”

Caroline had spoken.

Vanessa spun toward her.

“Mother.”

Caroline lowered her empty champagne glass onto a shelf.

“I saw the obituary for Samuel Marlowe. There was a photograph of Elena beside him.”

“Stop talking,” Julian said.

She flinched.

Then, with visible effort, she continued.

“I needed to know whether she had his papers.”

Elena stared at her.

The agency had contacted her the week after her father’s funeral.

She had thought it was luck.

They had offered her shelter so they could search everything she owned.

“My room?”

Caroline looked away.

“More than once.”

Elena thought of the small disturbances she had blamed on exhaustion. A drawer that would not close. Her father’s scarf folded differently. A letter moved inside a book.

Vanessa crossed her arms.

“There were no papers. We looked.”

Maxwell turned toward his bride.

For several seconds, he simply watched her.

“You knew.”

She opened her mouth.

“You knew who she was?”

“I knew there was a claim.”

“A claim?”

“She’s been living under your roof, handling your mother, playing that ridiculous instrument. What was I supposed to think?”

“You were supposed to tell me.”

“And have you do this?”

She gestured around the room.

“Destroy everything because some servant might have a blood connection?”

Elena felt the words strike, but this time she did not lower her eyes.

“You searched my father’s letters.”

Vanessa’s expression hardened.

“You should have burned them.”

A police siren sounded faintly beyond the grounds.

Julian glanced toward the curtains.

Maxwell noticed.

“You’re staying.”

“I intend to. Someone has to explain this spectacle.”

He took out his phone.

Maxwell did not stop him. Instead, he called the security desk and asked them to preserve the camera recordings, lock the archive room, and let the police through.

For the first time, Julian looked uncertain.

Elena shifted the violin in her arms.

Her father had repaired it two winters before he died. She remembered him at the workbench long after midnight, his magnifying glasses slipping down his nose.

She had offered to help.

He had covered something with a cloth.

Not now, sweetheart.

Later, when she asked why he had reopened a seam that was holding perfectly well, he said, “Sometimes you have to check what you’ve left inside.”

She had assumed he meant a loose shaving.

Now she looked at the old repair Eleanor had described.

“There’s something in it,” she said.

Julian moved.

Maxwell caught his arm.

It was quick, ugly, and over before anyone shouted. Julian struck the piano with his hip. The music box fell, landing open on the carpet.