Chapter 6: What Irene Finally Said
She was sitting up when I arrived.
The swelling around her eye had deepened overnight to a dark purple.
Her lip was still split at the corner.
But her hands were resting on top of the blanket, calm, and when I came through the door she looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen on her face in months.
Relief.
Real relief.
Not the desperate kind from the night before.
I sat in the chair beside her bed and took her hand.
"The folder," she said immediately.
"I have it.
Patricia Hale has copies.
The trust account is frozen."
She closed her eyes.
Her breath came out slow and long.
"I found the first message eight months ago," she said.
"I was using your laptop to print a recipe and the email was open.
I didn't mean to read it.
But I saw Daniel's name and Margaret's name and the words *before he updates the will* and I—" She stopped.
"I took a photograph of the screen.
I didn't know what to do with it."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
She looked at me.
"I tried.
Three weeks after I found it.
I said I was worried about Daniel, that something felt wrong.
You told me I was still adjusting to the family and that Daniel was the most trustworthy person you knew."
I remembered that conversation.
I had been distracted.
I had been kind but dismissive.
"Irene—"
"I'm not saying it to hurt you," she said quietly.
"I'm saying it so you understand why I stopped trying to tell you directly.
I started collecting instead.
Every message I could find.
Every transfer notification that came to the joint email.
I printed everything and kept it in the folder." She paused.
"Margaret found it two weeks ago.
She didn't find the folder, but she found me printing something and she knew.
That's when it got worse."
"Worse how?"
She was quiet for a moment.
"She started coming into our room when you weren't home.
Going through my things.
She told me once — she stood in the doorway of our bedroom and said, 'You think a piece of paper makes you a Wentworth.
It doesn't.
It makes you a liability.'"
My jaw tightened.
"She said that to you."
"She said a lot of things to me, Austin.
For months." Irene's voice stayed even, but her hand tightened around mine.
"I didn't want to make you choose between me and your mother.
I kept thinking I could find enough proof that you would see it yourself, without me having to ask you to take my word over hers."
I thought about every evening I had come home to find Irene quieter than she'd been in the morning.
Every time I had assumed it was tiredness, or the pregnancy, or the adjustment of living with my mother in the house.
I had been in the same rooms as this and seen nothing.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't," she said.
"Just — don't let her make you doubt it now.
Whatever she tells the police, whatever Daniel's lawyer says—"
"I have the recording from last night.
I have the folder.
I have Robert, and I have Patricia." I looked at her.
"And I have you telling me the truth right now, which I should have been listening to eight months ago."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then: "How bad is it?
With Daniel?"
"Bad enough that he called his lawyer the moment I mentioned the frozen account."
"And your mother?"
"She's still at the police station.
She hasn't asked for a lawyer yet, which means she's either very confident or very frightened."
Irene's expression shifted.
Something careful came into it.
"Austin," she said.
"There's one more thing.
Something I didn't put in the folder because I wasn't sure it was connected."
She reached toward the small drawer in the bedside table.
She opened it and took out her phone.
She found something and held the screen toward me.
It was a photograph.
Taken through a restaurant window, slightly blurred.
Margaret and a man I didn't recognize, sitting across from each other.
Between them on the table was what looked like a stack of documents.
"When was this taken?" I asked.
"Six weeks ago.
I was driving past and I saw her through the window.
I parked and took it from across the street." Irene paused.
"I don't know who he is.
But he came to the house once, two weeks later.
Margaret introduced him as an old friend.
She used a different name for him than the one on the restaurant reservation I looked up afterward."
I looked at the photograph again.
The man was in his fifties.
Well-dressed.
He was looking down at the documents, not at Margaret.
His posture was the posture of someone reviewing something before signing it.
"Send this to me," I said.
She did.
I forwarded it immediately to Patricia with one line: *Do you know who this is?*
Patricia's reply came back in under two minutes.
May you like
*Yes.
Call me now.*
