Chapter 3

JULIETTE

Sebastian's hand was still on the table, right next to the folder he had just signed without reading, and his eyes had not moved from my phone screen.

"Why is Adrian Kingsley texting you?" His voice had an edge I rarely heard from him. "You told me you two hadn't spoken in years."

"We haven't." I turned the phone face down, unbothered. "Apparently that changed yesterday, at your brother's funeral, when he showed up and stood at the edge of the cemetery like a ghost."

"And you didn't think that was worth mentioning to me?"

I almost laughed. "You're asking me that. Tonight. At this table."

Something in his face flickered, guilt trying to fight its way past the jealousy. "That's different."

"Is it?" I stood and gathered both folders into my arms, calm in a way that seemed to unsettle him more than shouting would have. "You spent three years keeping a locked drawer full of someone else's photos, and you want to be upset that a man I haven't spoken to in three years said five words to me at a funeral."

"I never said I wasn't in the wrong."

"You've never said much of anything, Sebastian." I walked toward the stairs. "Get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

"Juliette." He caught my wrist before I made it to the first step, gentler than I expected. "Are we okay?"

I looked down at his hand until he let go. "We signed papers tonight, Sebastian. We're exactly as okay as two people who just did that."

He did not follow me upstairs, and I did not look back to see what his face was doing.

I did not know yet how right I was about tomorrow.

Snow had piled against the windows overnight, thick enough to swallow the driveway completely. I woke to a crash so loud I thought something had actually fallen off the roof.

By the time I reached the hallway, it looked like a storm had blown straight through the house instead of around it. Cushions from the living room sat in a heap outside my door. A vase lay shattered near the stairs.

Rosa hurried after Oliver, pleading uselessly. "Sweetheart, please, not the tea set, that one's fragile."

He knocked it off the shelf anyway, porcelain scattering across the floor.

"Uncle Sebastian said this house is basically mine too," Oliver announced, chin lifted with the confidence only a four year old could manage. "You're just the lady who lives here."

He looked up at me, waiting for a reaction. When I gave him none, his shoulders sagged a little, like the silence itself was a disappointment.

"Go ahead," I said evenly. "Just leave the painting in the study alone. That one actually matters to me."

His eyes lit with interest the second I said it.

Rosa sighed once he had run off toward the study. "Ma'am, you really shouldn't tell him that. You basically told him where to aim."

"I know exactly what I'm doing, Rosa."

"With respect, ma'am, it doesn't look like it from where I'm standing."

"Trust me on this one," I said. "I promise it looks worse than it is."

What Rosa did not know, and what Delphine certainly did not know either, was that the painting hanging in that study was a very good copy. The real one, painted by Sebastian's grandfather in the last year of his life, sat safely in a friend's private gallery, untouched, exactly where it belonged. A dead man's last work did not deserve to hang somewhere it could be destroyed by a child chasing attention.

A few minutes later, Rosa's voice cracked through the house again. "Ms. Marsh, come quick, he's torn the painting."

I walked down calmly, already knowing what I would find, and there it was, canvas split straight down the middle, paint flaking onto the floor.

Oliver looked up at me, defiant despite himself.

"You did this on purpose," Delphine said the second she saw my face, rushing over with Oliver already gathered against her hip.

"I was upstairs the whole time," I said. "You watched me come down after you did."

"You told him it mattered to you. You knew he'd go straight for it."

"I said don't touch it. He touched it anyway." I looked past her toward Rosa. "Call the Hartwell house. Tell them what happened."

"Don't you dare," Delphine snapped. "This is a family matter. We don't need Constance flying over here to make it worse."

"It became a family matter the moment Oliver destroyed a dead man's last painting," I said. "I'm not covering for that."

"You're doing this because of last night, aren't you? This has nothing to do with the painting. This is about you being petty over some text message."

"Careful," I said quietly. "You don't want to bring up whose name was on that screen."

Her mouth snapped shut.

Before I could answer, Oliver charged at me, small fists swinging, and caught me off guard hard enough to knock me back a step against the banister. Pain shot up through my hip where I hit the railing, sharp enough that my vision blurred white for a second.

"Don't call Grandma," Oliver shouted. "She'll be mad at Mommy."

"She should be," I said, straightening slowly, one hand pressed to my side.

Delphine did not apologize for the shove. She never did. She simply pulled Oliver tighter against her, as though I were the danger in the room and not the other way around. I let the silence sit there instead of filling it. Some fights were not worth winning out loud.

"Juliette, please, don't do this. You know how Constance gets."

I did know. That was exactly the point.

Rosa was already on the phone by the time I made it to the study door, calling ahead in a low, apologetic voice. I stood there a moment longer, staring at the ruined canvas, letting myself feel exactly nothing about a painting that had never really been at risk in the first place.

Delphine did not go far. She hovered near the staircase with Oliver on her hip, watching me the way a person watches a storm they cannot decide whether to run from. She did not apologize again. I did not expect her to.

I went to change out of the sweater Oliver had gotten paint on, and by the time I came back down, the tension in the house had thickened into something almost physical. Rosa kept glancing at the front windows every few minutes, as if she could hurry the snowplows along by sheer will.

Twenty minutes later, headlights swept across the snow outside.

A black sedan pulled into the driveway, and for a moment I assumed it was Constance Hartwell arriving to deliver the reckoning Delphine so clearly dreaded.

It was not her car.

A second set of headlights turned in right behind the first, slower, more careful on the ice, and stopped a few feet from the front steps.

Delphine went pale beside me. "Is that."

I did not need her to finish the sentence.

Two car doors opened at almost the exact same moment. Constance Hartwell stepped out of the first car, already furious before her heels touched the snow, her coat whipping open in the wind as she started up the driveway without waiting for anyone to greet her.

I barely registered her. My eyes had already gone to the second car, to the man taking his time getting out of it, unhurried in a way that felt deliberate, like he wanted me to see every second of it.

And out of the second car, unannounced, uninvited, and three years overdue, stepped Adrian Kingsley.