Inheritance

Chapter 3

I did not go far on the first night. I booked a cheap room at a small inn near the bus station and paid in cash. The bed was hard, and the walls were thin. I slept like a stone.

In the morning, I faced a problem. I had four thousand dollars in savings and no job that would last past the Sunless. Even if I spent all of it on supplies, it would not be enough to feed one person for a winter that lasted years. I needed real money. I needed it fast.

I sat on the bed and chewed the end of my pen. In my first life, there had been one small thing I never understood. After my grandmother Ines died, a lawyer kept sending letters to the Vale house with my name on them. Odette always said they were junk mail. I never saw one. Back then, I was too busy to ask.

Now I thought about it very hard.

Why would junk mail come from a lawyer?

I paid for one more night at the inn. Then I called a taxi and went back to the Vale mansion, but not through the front door. I waited until Odette and Cordelia left for their weekly tea. Then I used my old key to slip through the kitchen.

The house was quiet. I tiptoed up the stairs, past the portraits of dead Vales, and into Odette’s sewing room. It was a little room full of yarn and fabric, and I had cleaned it a hundred times. But I had never opened her big wooden sewing box. She always said it was private.

I opened it now.

Under the spools of thread and the pin cushions, I found a thick bundle of envelopes tied with a faded ribbon. My hands began to shake. The name on the top envelope was in a neat, blue-inked hand.

Elowen Marsh.

I counted them. There were nineteen letters. All of them were from the same law office. All of them were unopened.

I sat down on the floor and began to read. The first letter was dated four years ago, a week after my grandmother’s funeral. It said that Ines Marsh had left her granddaughter a seaside house called Lantern Point, along with a trust fund and a private note. The lawyer asked me to call him as soon as possible. He had sent seven more letters after that. Then he stopped, and I could almost feel his worry in the page.

I read until my eyes burned. The trust was not small. It was enough money to buy a hundred of my old shelters.

Odette had hidden it from me. Not for a month, not for a year. For four years. She had let me sell my grandmother’s ring, work two jobs, and go hungry, all so I would stay poor and needy and never leave her son.

I felt something cold and hard form inside me, like ice forming over a lake. It was not hot anger. It was something quieter and much more dangerous.

I put the letters in my bag. Then, because I was already there, I went to Caspian’s study and sat in his leather chair. In my first life, I never touched his things. Now I turned on his computer. His password was his own birthday. It always had been.

I did not look for love letters. I knew what I would find. But I wanted to see exactly what I was leaving.

There was a folder named B.L. I clicked it.

It was full of pictures. Caspian and a pretty, sharp-faced woman with dark red lips. They were on a beach. They were at a restaurant. They were kissing in a car. The woman was Briar Lockhart, the “friend from his business school” who always came to our house at Christmas.

I kept scrolling, and my stomach turned over.

The last folder was named Pip. It was full of baby pictures, birthday cakes, and school drawings. In every one of them, Pip was laughing in Caspian’s arms. Under one photo, someone had typed a note: Our little boy turned six today.

Our little boy.

I stared at the screen. Pip was not Caspian’s nephew. He was Caspian’s son. For six years, I had been hugging, feeding, and loving a child whose mother was my husband’s secret lover. They had let me call him my nephew. They had let me cry when he cried.

I closed the computer very carefully, like it might break. Then I sat in that leather chair in the afternoon sun and I thought about the small boy behind the steel door, calling for Aunt Elo.

The little voice had been real. His love had been real. Pip was only a child, and none of this was his fault.

I took a photo of every proof on the screen with my phone. Then I walked out of the Vale mansion for the last time.

• • •

Mr. Abernathy Pell was a short, silver-haired man with round glasses and tired eyes. His office smelled of old paper and peppermint. When his secretary announced my name, he dropped a whole stack of folders.

“Miss Marsh,” he said. He stood up as if I were a ghost. “I had almost given up. Four years. I sent eight letters!”

“I know,” I said, and I handed him the nineteen envelopes. “None of them reached me. I only found them yesterday.”

He looked at the pile, and his kind face went hard. “Who kept them?”

“It does not matter anymore.”

It took two hours to sign everything. When it was over, I was the legal owner of Lantern Point, a large house on a high cliff by the sea, and a trust account that I could finally touch. Mr. Pell slid a small envelope across the desk.

“Your grandmother asked me to give you this when you were ready,” he said. “She said you would know what it meant.”

Inside was a single old brass key. It was not the shape of the one on my wrist, but it was close.

I did not say a word. I only closed my hand around it and felt my pulse in my fingers.

Mr. Pell hesitated. “Miss Marsh, your grandmother was a very careful woman. A few weeks before she passed, she said something strange. She told me, ‘Elowen will need that house before the sky falls.’ I thought she was confused.” He gave a nervous little laugh. “I am sure it meant nothing.”

I stood up. My legs felt like water.

“Mr. Pell,” I said slowly, “do you have a quiet way to keep this private? I do not want anyone to know I have this money. Not my husband. Not his family.”

He studied my face for a long moment. Then he nodded. “You have my word.”

I walked out of his office into a warm afternoon, with a fortune in my name and a key in my fist. People were shopping, laughing, and carrying coffee. No one looked up at the sky.

But I did. I looked up at the clear blue and counted. Eighty-eight days left.