That frightened me more than his fury.
Daniel stepped in front of me. “Don’t.”
Richard ignored him. “You don’t understand what you’re touching.”
I held my grandmother’s necklace so tightly the clasp bit into my palm.
“Then I suppose I’ll have to learn.”
His jaw tightened. “Some things are buried for a reason.”
Arthur moved between us with perfect calm. “Mr. Vance, all communications go through counsel.”
Richard looked at him with open contempt. “You have no idea what her family did.”
Daniel stiffened. “What is that supposed to mean?”
But Richard’s lawyer had reached him by then, gripping his arm and whispering sharply. Richard allowed himself to be turned away, but not before one last look at me.
It was not the look of a man afraid of losing a divorce.
It was the look of a man afraid a story older than our marriage was beginning to wake up.
Arthur guided us into a private conference room on the second floor. Nora came with us, as did Daniel. Chloe did not. When Arthur asked whether I wanted her included, I shook my head. Whatever courage had made her return the necklace and mention the boxes, she still belonged to a part of Richard’s life I was not ready to untangle.
The conference room smelled faintly of coffee and dust. A stack of legal pads sat near the center of the table. Someone had left a half-empty bottle of water beside a tissue box.
Ordinary things.
I sat down because my knees had stopped feeling trustworthy.
Daniel sat beside me, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. For years, that distance had been filled with Richard’s voice, Richard’s lies, Richard’s careful little suggestions that my brother was embarrassed by me and better off without my chaos.
Now Daniel was here, real and breathing, his hand resting on the table as if I could take it whenever I wanted.
Arthur placed his phone on speaker.
“Evan,” he said, “we’re in a secure room. Tell us exactly what you found.”
A man’s voice crackled through. “The safe was behind a false panel in the townhouse study. We opened it under the preservation order with the locksmith and court officer present. Contents included passports, banking records, several unsigned but notarized transfer forms, and a sealed envelope marked For Emily, in Grace Vance’s handwriting.”
My throat closed around my mother’s name.
Arthur asked, “What was inside?”
“A marriage certificate dated thirty-six years ago. Grace Eleanor Hart and Charles Raymond Vance. Filed in Vermont. There’s also a second document, not yet verified, that appears to be a dissolution filing dated two years later. And a photograph.”
“What photograph?” Daniel asked.
The investigator paused. “A young Grace standing outside a workshop with Charles Vance and another man. The other man appears to be your father, Robert.”
Daniel leaned back slowly.
“My father knew him,” he whispered.
Arthur looked at me. “Emily?”
I tried to remember.
My father had been quiet whenever Richard’s family came up. At our wedding, he had remained polite but subdued, shaking Charles Vance’s hand with an expression I had mistaken for ordinary father-of-the-bride grief. My mother had already passed by then. She had never met Richard.
Or so I thought.
“Send the images to me securely,” Arthur said.
