Todos los capítulos de The Rival I Let In: Capítulo 51 - Capítulo 60

I couldn’t stop staring at the sentence.“This is the last time I will trust him.”My grandmother’s handwriting was steady and bold, no second thoughts. Just those eight words sitting beside Vesper’s name three days before everything fell apart.It was the clearest proof that she had finally seen him for what he was but the wordings wouldn’t leave me alone. “The last time”. It meant there had been other times, It meant she had trusted him before and that trust might have given him access to things he should never have touched.Julianii stood beside me, reading the same line over my shoulder.“She knew,” he said.“She knew…….but then,” I answered. “But she trusted him long enough for it to matter.”We spread the surrounding pages across the table, the entry itself was short, from the arrival time till the departure time, it was nearly three hours between them. No notes about the purpose of the visit, no summary……nothing.“Three hours,” Julianii said. “That’s not a quick conversation.”

I didn’t panic.I took out my phone and photographed the note from every angle before I touched it again. The six words stayed clear on the screen.“Your grandmother should have burned it.”Mireille arrived sooner than I expected. She moved through the study carefully and meticulously, with gloved hands and quiet focus. She checked the drawers, the cabinet, the floor, the tables.“They knew exactly what they wanted and they didn’t waste time looking for anything else.”I stood in the doorway, arms folded tightly across my chest. “The original will?”“Yes.”The importance of that settled slowly. The version read aloud after my grandmother’s death had been a copy. The lawyer had called it the operative document but the original had always existed somewhere in this house.“What if the original will said something different?” I asked.Mireille looked at me. “It’s possible. If someone removed the original, they may be trying to alter or destroy evidence about the conditions it contained. E

The solicitor didn't let us leave right away. He stood by the door with the card still visible in my hand, as though he wanted to make sure I understood what I was holding."The deposit box was created years before the collapse of the Marchetti family," he said. "Your grandmother and Mr Marchetti's father arranged it together and it requires both keys, neither family could have ever opened it alone.""Why would they build it that way?" Mireille asked."I can't speak to their reasons." He paused. "But I can speak to the risk of it been built that way. The contents may be legally sensitive and I strongly advise you not to remove anything until you understand exactly what you're looking at.""Understood," Julianii said."Miss Castellane?""Understood," I said.He held my gaze a second longer. "Your grandmother trusted very few people with her private affairs, please be careful with what she left you."Mireille squeezed my arm before we left. "I'll be a phone call away," she said. "If any

I didn't remember the drive home, I only remembered the guard at the vault door, and Julianii's hand at my lower back as we walked out, light enough that I could have pretended it wasn't there. After that, there was only the quiet of the car and the gray city moving past the window.The front door of Castellane House closed behind us, and the sound went through the empty hall.I didn't go upstairs and I didn't change out of the clothes I had worn to the lawyer's office. I walked straight to the kitchen with my coat still on and stood in the middle of the kitchen.Julianii followed and I heard him stop at the doorway.I opened a cabinet, looked at the plates stacked inside and closed it.I opened another, mugs and closed that one too.The third held tins and jars my grandmother had labeled in her careful handwriting. I stared at them until the letters blurred."You're not looking for anything," Julianii said.My hand stayed on the cabinet door and I let out a breath I hadn't known I wa

Julianii worked through the night after she left. He sat on the floor of the study with the drawer open beside him and went through the file page by page, every sheet got the same question. Did it help him find Vesper? Or did it only remind him of the man he had been when he wrote it?The notes on Sabine's schedule went into the metal bin. So did the list of her accounts, and the pages of questions he had once planned to ask about her father. He fed them to the flame one at a time and watched them curl. But the evidence stayed.The financial trails, the shell company records, and the copies of what his father had left behind went into a plain gray folder. He slid it into a safe behind the bookcase, and then he sat there with his back against the shelves.But the one folder on his laptop he did not touch, his cursor hovered over it for a long time. And he told himself he would deal with it later.I didn't end the engagement.I thought about it. I thought about it in the shower, in the