All Chapters of The 100-Day Wife: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

She read it at the kitchen table, with tea, because he had told her not to read it on an empty stomach and she was done not listening to Walter Crowther.If you're reading this, the will has done whatever the will was going to do, and I'm past being yelled at for it. Good. Let them have the shares. Shares were never the inheritance.Your mother was Elena Marsh when I met her. You won't remember the Meridian - you were not yet born, and your mother did not talk about it afterward, because she was made not to. Twenty-seven years ago it was my first hotel, and my pride, and one October night it burned with a hundred and eleven guests inside.Eleven people did not come out. It would have been forty, except a twenty-two-year-old agency nurse working the floor above the fire stair went back in six times with wet towels and a master key, and carried out strangers until the stairwell gave.Your mother saved forty people that night, kiddo, and one of them was my son. Sebastian's father. He liv

Danny came to Comfrey Lane at nine at night, jittery, twenty-four years old and still checking the street through the curtains the way he'd been doing since he was nineteen and owed his first five hundred.He looked at the photograph for four seconds and went grey."That's him. That's the man who bought my note." He dropped into a chair like his strings were cut. "Immy, that's him. Came to the garage in a car that cost more than the garage. Paid the whole debt, cash, forty grand, in a leather bag like it was a round of drinks. I thought God had finally noticed me." He laughed, awful. "God had not noticed me.""What did he want?" Sebastian asked."Nothing. That's the thing that kept me up." Danny's hands were shaking around the tea Imogen had made him. "He said a friend of the family was taking care of it. He asked about my mum. About the house. He asked if my sister ever talked about work. And then, two weeks before the papers got the contract, he comes back and says the friend needs

Mercantile Trust kept its safe-deposit boxes in a vault off Threadneedle Street, behind a door designed to make burglars feel underdressed.The attendant was sixty, polished, and named Mr. Pruitt, and he examined the deposit key and Walter's card the way a magistrate examines an alibi."Box one-one-eight," he said. "Rented March 1999. The signature card lists two principals." He turned the card so they could read it. "W. Crowther. And E. Marsh. And - " his finger moved down, " - the issue of E. Marsh, on production of identification. It has been waiting twenty-seven years for you, madam."Imogen had learned at her mother's grave that grief could arrive wearing any face. She had not expected it to wear a signature card in a bank basement, in Walter Crowther's small, arrogant hand, dated three months after the fire, arranging for a nurse's children to inherit a truth."Her daughter," Sebastian said quietly. "Imogen Hartley."The box was the size of a shoebox and heavier than grief. Prui

In the morning, Imogen did what she had wanted to do since the first text: she answered.Who are you? she wrote, to the unknown number, and watched the message sit there, grey, undelivered to a phone that had already forgotten its own SIM."The number is dead," Sebastian said, reading over her shoulder with his coffee going cold. "They all are. Every text comes from a different one. Buy a SIM, send once, destroy it." He said it the way you describe weather in a country you've lived in. "That's tradecraft. That's a man who spent thirty years being the message nobody could trace.""Sorrell.""Or his keeper. Or Walter's man." He put the coffee down. "Or Sorrell himself, Imogen. That's the thing I can't make sit still. The roses were mine. Walter wrote that he had them delivered by a man he shouldn't have trusted. If Sorrell is telling you the roses were his - not Walter's, his - then he's telling you the wreath at your mother's funeral was personal.""A confession in installments," she s

The room knew Bianca Lancaster the way a room knows weather. Eleven directors turned, and the temperature of the fortieth floor changed.Vivienne did not turn. Imogen noticed that. Vivienne kept her eyes on the agenda in front of her with the small, satisfied stillness of a woman whose guest has arrived exactly on cue."Miss Lancaster." The chair, old Lindqvist, recovered first. "This is a closed session.""I hold four hundred thousand shares through the Lancaster trust," Bianca said, taking the visitors' chair as if it had been polished for her. "Observer rights, page nineteen of the articles. Do check." She crossed her legs and looked at Sebastian with two months of practiced heartbreak.Imogen had been assessing people in doorways her whole working life - the ones who would faint, the ones who would fight, the ones whose grief was real and the ones performing it for the waiting room. Bianca Lancaster was performing. Under the white suit and the wounded eyes there was something cold