Chapter 59

• I had always believed there was a limit to how much truth a person could carry in silence, but standing in the marble foyer of Howard Blackwell’s estate, I felt the weight of a history that had been written behind closed doors, beneath polished floors, and inside ledgers no one was meant to read. The place smelled like money that had aged too long—cold, pristine, with nothing human left in its corners. The butler who opened the door barely looked at me. He had been told I was coming.
• Howard stood waiting in the drawing room. His back was turned to the fireplace, arms folded, one ankle casually hooked over the other like this was a social call. He wore a suit that looked expensive but careless. His salt-and-pepper hair had been combed back, but I could still see the edges where the dye no longer touched. I had never met him like this before, not as the man behind Julian’s silence, not as the figure who had shaped so many of the betrayals still rippling through my life. Only in photographs and in brief, fragmented stories had I pieced him together. But now he stood before me, the architect of a lie that had stretched through decades.
• “You took your time,” he said, turning slowly with a glass of something amber in his hand. “But I suppose a woman like you prefers her dramatics.”