Chapter 3
Seraphine’s story began eleven years earlier.
The winter road.
A car.
Black ice.
An accident I knew about.
The vehicle carrying Seraphine and her cousin went over an embankment.
Her cousin died.
Seraphine survived.
That part had been hidden.
I had been told both women were gone.
No viewing.
Closed casket.
My father handled everything while I was recovering from a gunshot wound from an unrelated attack three days earlier.
Bad timing is useful to conspirators.
I was confined to another estate.
Medicated.
Angry.
Half-conscious.
My father brought me Seraphine’s wedding ring.
Told me there had been nothing else to return.
I believed him.
Why would I not?
Seraphine woke six days after the crash.
At a private house owned by my father.
Not a hospital by then.
She had fractured ribs, a concussion, and gaps in memory.
My father told her I blamed her for traveling against my wishes.
Lie.
He told her I had ordered her recovery kept away from the estate.
Lie.
Then the first forged letter came.
Cold.
Controlled.
Exactly the kind of man I could have been under pressure.
That was why it worked.
She believed me capable.
That hurt.
Not because she lacked faith.
Because I had given the world enough hardness that a cruel forgery sounded plausible in my voice.
“Why didn’t you come anyway?”
I asked.
Seraphine looked at me.
“I tried.”
Three months after the crash, she left the recovery house.
Reached the Alderbourne outer gate.
My father met her himself.
He told her I had begun divorce proceedings and would refuse to see her.
No legal details mattered to her.
The rejection did.
Then he offered money.
A cottage.
Distance.
She accepted the cottage.
Not the story completely.
But enough.
Years passed.
My father died.
And still she did not come.
“Why?”
Seraphine looked toward Claribel.
“Because then she found me.”
I turned.
Claribel’s face tightened.
Seraphine continued.
“Two years ago.”
Claribel discovered the cottage through old family accounts.
She visited.
Told Seraphine I was engaged.
That part eventually became true.
But not then.
Two years ago, Claribel and I barely knew each other.
“You told her we were engaged before we even began?”
Claribel whispered:
“I panicked.”
That word again.
Cowardice dressed as momentary instinct.
Then Seraphine said:
“She brought me here.”
My chest tightened.
“Why?”
May you like
“Because I said I was coming to find you.”
Claribel had hidden my living wife inside my own estate because distance was no longer enough.
