“…my husband, David, his arms wrapped tightly around a woman who looked terrifyingly like me.”
My breath caught in my throat. The woman in the photo had my exact shade of auburn hair, my delicate jawline, and my height. But her eyes were hollow, haunted, and fixed on the camera with a silent scream. Resting on her left hand, clearly visible, was the heavy, antique sapphire ring currently sitting on my own finger—the ring David had claimed was a “family heirloom kept hidden away just for his true love.”
I flipped the photograph over again. Written in Eleanor’s sharp, cursive script were words that made the elegant mahogany walls of the lawyer’s office spin.
“I couldn’t protect her from him. I tried to be cruel, to drive you away so you wouldn’t be next, but you were too stubborn to leave. The deed is to an off-grid cabin under a shell corporation. The trust funds are hidden under the floorboards. Do not go home with him tonight. Run.”
“Sweetheart?”
David’s voice shattered the silence. I looked up. He was leaning forward in his leather armchair, his handsome face twisted into a mask of polite confusion, but his eyes were dark and calculating. He didn’t like being left out. He didn’t like losing control.
“What did my mother leave you?” he asked, his tone dripping with fake gentleness. He reached a hand out across the wide mahogany table.
My survival instinct, dormant for five years of enduring his mother’s ‘abuse’ and his ‘comforting’ embrace, roared to life. Eleanor hadn’t been a monster. She had been a prisoner in her own family, trying to scare off the prey her son kept bringing home.
“It’s…” I forced my breathing to slow, slipping the photograph behind the folded deed. I gave him a teary, wavering smile. “It’s just an apology. A letter saying she was sorry for how she treated me. And… a deed to a small burial plot she bought for me near the family estate.”
David’s tense shoulders visibly relaxed. A fleeting smirk crossed his lips before he hid it behind a sympathetic sigh. “That sounds like mother. Always dramatic, even from the grave. Let me see.”
“No,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. I folded the black envelope and shoved it deep into my purse. “It’s personal, David. She was awful to me, and I just… I need a moment to process this.”
The lawyer, a sharp-eyed older man who was sweating profusely, cleared his throat. “The envelope is legally hers alone, David. Now, if we could move on to the estate distribution…”
As David turned his attention back to the lawyer, greed lighting up his features, I gripped my purse tightly. I had three hours before he would expect me back at our house. Three hours to disappear into the mountains, to find the cabin, and to figure out what really happened to the girl who wore my ring first.
