Chapter 4

The note was waiting on her pillow three days later, folded once, no envelope, no name.

Amelia almost didn't notice it at first, the east suite was full of things that weren't hers, and a stray piece of paper barely registered against the unfamiliar furniture, the borrowed perfume bottles on the vanity, the closet of clothes she still hadn't grown used to wearing. It was only when she sat down on the bed, exhausted after another dinner spent performing Olivia’s laugh for people who’d known her sister since childhood, that she saw the handwriting and went completely still.

Stop looking for Olivia if you want to stay alive.

No signature. No explanation. Just seven words, typed rather than handwritten, the paper crisp and new, as though it had been printed somewhere in this very house within the last few hours.

Her hands went cold.

Amelia checked the door, locked exactly as she’d left it. The window latched. Nothing disturbed except the note itself, placed with deliberate precision in the center of her pillow, impossible to miss.

Someone had been in her room.

She thought back over the evening, trying to place exactly when it might have happened. Dinner had run long. Afterward, she remembered passing Delphine in the east hallway on her way upstairs. Delphine, offering a pleasant goodnight and a comment about how tired Amelia looked lately, standing exactly outside the corridor that led to guest suite, though her own rooms were in the opposite wing entirely. Amelia hadn't thought anything of it at that time. She hadn't had a reason to

Someone in this house knew she was searching.

She thought immediately of the greenhouse, of Adrian’s carefully guarded expression when she’d asked about his mother, of his unfinished sentence… A conversation for another day, one you're not ready for yet. Had he done this? Was this his version of a warning, delivered anonymously because he couldn't bring himself to say it to her face?

Or it was someone else. Mrs. Whitfield, sharp-eyed and always watching, Delphine, who spoke about Olivia with a little too much familiarity and a little too much interest in how Amelia responded to it. Someone whose name she didn't even know yet, moving through this house with more knowledge of what had actually happened to Olivia than Amelia had managed to gather in three days of careful, frightened searching.

She found Adrian in his study that night, the note clutched in her hand exactly the way she’d clutched Olivia’s note for four days earlier. In a different house, in a life that already felt impossibly far away.

“Did you leave this?”

Adrian looked up from his desk, and whatever he saw in her face made him set down his pen immediately. He crossed the room, took the paper from her outstretched hand, and read it twice.

Something shifted in his expression not surprise, exactly, but a kind of grim confirmation, as though a fear he’d been carrying quietly had just been proven correct.

“No, he said. “I didn't leave this.”

“Then who did?”

“I don't know.” He set the note down on his desk, his jaw tight. “But it means someone in this house or with someone with access to it already knows you are not simply grieving your sister quietly. They know you're looking.”

“Good.” Amelia's voice shook, but she didn't back down. “Maybe now you'll finally tell me something useful, instead of deciding on your own what I’m allowed to know.”

Adrian was quiet for a long moment, studying her with an intensity that made her want to look away and refuse to, both at once.

“Sit down,” he said finally.

“I don't want to sit down. I want…”

“Amelia.” Her name, not Olivia’s, not Mrs. Kingston the first time he’d used it since the wedding. “Sit down. Please.”

She sat.

Adrian moved to the window, his back to her, the city light faint and and distant behind the glass. “Twenty-five years ago, my father and your grandfather made an agreement. I don't know all of it, I was five years old when my mother died, no one in this family has ever spoken about what actually happened to her, not even to me. What I do know is that Olivia found something. Documents, maybe, or something someone said. Enough to understand that the study I grew up believing about my mother’s death wasn't true.”

Amelia's pulse quickened. “And she confronted you about it?”

“She confronted my father.” Adrain turned back to face her, something raw and unguarded finally showing the careful control he wore like armor. “Two days before the wedding. I don't know exactly what she said. I only know that the day after, she started receiving the same kind of message you got. And the day after that, she was gone.”

The room went very still.

“You think whoever sent this note is the same person who scared her into running.”

“I think,” Adrian said quietly. “that whoever is protecting that secret has already proven they’re willing to threaten one Carter sister into silence. I am not interested in finding out what they're willing to do to a second one.”

Amelia looked down at the note on her lap, seven typed words that suddenly felt less like a warning and more like a threat with a proven track record.

“Then help me,” she said. “Actually help me, instead of keeping me in the dark for my own protection. Because whoever this is already knows I’m looking, Adrian. Silence isn't keeping me safe anymore. It's just keeping me useless.”

For a long moment, Adrian said quietly, weighing something behind his carefully composed features.

Then, slowly, he opened the top drawer of his desk and withdrew a thin file, worn at the edges, clearly handled many times before.

“This is everything I've managed to find on my own,” he said, sliding it across the desk toward her. “It isn't much. But if you are determined to do this anyway, I'd rather you do it with what I already know than stumble into something more dangerous alone.”

Amelia stared at the file, then up at him, something shifting between them that hadn't been there in the study for four days ago, when he’d told her their marriage existed for exactly one reason and had nothing to do with either of them.

She was starting to suspect that wasn't entirely true anymore.

“Why now?” she asked quietly, her fingers resting on the edge of the file without opening it yet. “You could have kept this locked away. You could have kept lying to me the way everyone else in this house has.”

Adrian held her gaze, something tired and honest finally breaking through. “Because I watched what happened the last time a Carter sister went looking for the truth alone. I’m not making that mistake twice.”

Amelia opened the file.