Todos los capítulos de The Rival I Let In: Capítulo 71 - Capítulo 76

I slept in the blue room at the end of the hall upstairs.It was the room my grandmother kept for guests. The bed was too large and the sheets smelled faintly of lavender, and I lay on top of the covers in my clothes, staring at a ceiling I had memorized as a child.I didn't cry, not that I had expected to.I listened instead.For a long time the house was perfectly quiet. Then, somewhere after midnight, I heard footsteps on the stairs. They were slow and soft, and they stopped outside my door.My heart stopped with them.I waited for the knock.It didn't come.After a minute, the footsteps moved away. A door closed somewhere below. And I lay in the dark with my hand pressed flat against my chest, unsure whether I was relieved or something far worse.I woke up to gray light and the smell of coffee.For a moment I couldn't place it. Then I sat up and saw a thin line of steam rising from the floor outside my door, where the light came in through the gap beneath the frame.I crossed the

Mireille left in a taxi. She had a call to make and a stack of filings to cross check, and she squeezed my hand once on the pavement before she went. She didn't say anything about the look on my face, she just touched my arm and told me to eat something.Julianii was still in the car.He had been there for an hour. When I came down the steps, he got out and opened my door, and his eyes went over my face the way they always did now, quick and careful."Are you all right?""Drive," I said.He didn't ask again.We went home through the afternoon traffic without speaking to each other.I watched the city slide past the window. A woman pushed a pram, a boy chased a pigeon across a square. Everything looked ordinary, and I held the lawyer's last words in my head like a coal I couldn't put down.“After her death, there was one other person he feared.”“Julianii Marchetti.”Julianii turned through the gates of Castellane House and rolled up the drive. He stopped by the fountain and switched o

I didn't sleep. I sat on the floor of my grandmother's dressing room until the light went out of the window, holding the photograph in both hands. Then I stood, switched off the lamp, and walked down the stairs with the picture pressed against my chest.The house was silent and a line of light showed beneath the study door at the far end of the hall, and I walked past it without slowing.I didn't want to see him.Not yet.I wanted to see “her.”The panel at the end of the east wing opened on the first press.My hand knew where to go now. Low on the left, in the groove of the carving. The wood sighed inward, and the cold, dry smell of old paper came out to meet me. I turned on the lamp Julianii had left on the desk and stood in the center of the little room.The monitors still stared down at me. The folders were still lined up on the shelves, some of them open where we had left them, their pages fanned across the wood like the feathers of something that had stopped flying."You knew,"