Chapter 6: What Celeste Did Next
I was on the road to Milwaukee within the hour.
Marcus drove.
I sat in the back and read my mother's letter.
It was four pages, written in the weeks before her speech went, the handwriting getting smaller and more careful toward the end as though she was rationing the strength in her hand.
She had known about Ewan for eight months before she lost her voice.
A letter had reached her through a former housekeeper — someone Ewan had tracked down, one careful step at a time, trying to find a way back in without triggering whatever had made his brother want him gone.
He hadn't known it was Celeste.
He had only known that every time he got close, a door closed.
My mother had written back.
Three letters, smuggled out through Delia, who had agreed without being asked and without being told the full reason, because she had recognized Ewan's name from the night of the fire and understood immediately what it meant.
The last line of my mother's letter read: *I could not speak the words.
But I could make sure someone kept them safe until you were ready to hear them.
You were always the one who needed to be sure before you moved.
I am sure for you.
Go find your brother.*
I folded the letter and put it in my coat pocket.
My phone rang.
It was a number I recognized — the estate's landline.
"She's gone," the housekeeper said when I answered.
"Miss Vandermark.
She left about forty minutes ago with two bags.
She took the car from the garage — the grey one, not the one she usually uses."
"Did she say anything?"
"She left a note on the kitchen table.
It says — " A pause.
Paper rustling.
" — *Tell him I wish him luck finding what he's looking for.
He always needed a project.*"
I looked out the window at the highway.
"Call the gate at the Lakeshore property and tell them not to let that car through.
Then call my attorney and tell him I need the prenuptial agreement reviewed by noon."
"Yes, sir."
I ended the call.
Marcus glanced in the mirror but said nothing.
She had run.
Which meant she had known, from the moment I came back to the estate and found her in the cellar, that the version of events she had built over four years was finished.
She had spent the night deciding what to take and what to leave.
She had left the key.
I thought about that.
She had left the key deliberately.
Not forgotten it — left it.
Which meant the safe-deposit box was either empty now or contained something she wanted me to find.
Neither option was comfortable.
My attorney called back at nine-forty.
He had pulled the prenuptial agreement and the estate documents.
"There's a problem," he said.
"Tell me."
"The prenuptial covers asset division in the event of divorce or separation.
But there's a secondary clause — one that was added in the third draft, which I did not prepare." A pause.
"It grants Celeste Vandermark power of attorney over your mother's medical and financial decisions in the event that you are — and I'm reading directly — *incapacitated, unreachable, or legally unable to act.*"
I was quiet for a moment.
"Who added that clause?"
"The signature on the amendment is yours."
"It isn't."
"I know," he said.
"Which is why I'm calling you before I do anything else."
A forged signature on a legal document.
Power of attorney over my mother.
If I had signed the marriage certificate in nineteen days, that clause would have become active and enforceable.
Celeste hadn't needed me to love her.
She hadn't needed the marriage to last.
She had needed thirty days of legal standing and one signature on one document, and my mother — who could not speak, who could not warn me, who had been lying in that bed with a machine breathing for her — would have been entirely in Celeste Vandermark's hands.
"File a fraud complaint," I said.
"Today.
And get a handwriting analyst on that signature before the end of the week."
"Already making the call," he said.
Milwaukee was ninety miles away.
May you like
The road was clear and the sky had gone from grey to a pale, cold blue, the kind that comes after heavy snow when the air has been scrubbed clean of everything.
I put my phone in my pocket and watched the distance close.
