Chapter 4
I spoke to Nella before anyone else.
She had cared for Mother for nine months.
Twenty-four years old.
Quiet until quiet stopped working.
“How long has this been happening?”
Nella looked uncomfortable.
“About six weeks.”
The punishments started small.
Dessert removed when Mother asked who Davina’s father was.
Tea withheld when she insisted she had seen Davina in the mansion before their supposed first meeting.
Then full meals delayed.
Always explained as confusion.
Mother forgot she had eaten.
Mother had already had enough sugar.
Mother became agitated after food.
Reasonable sentences individually.
A pattern together.
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“I tried.”
There it was.
Again.
“When?”
Twice.
First, Nella told the house steward Mother became upset whenever Davina visited alone.
The steward said fiancées and mothers often clash.
Second, Nella approached me after breakfast.
I remembered.
Barely.
Davina entered.
Nella said it could wait.
I let it.
My failure.
Not equal to Davina’s.
Still mine.
“What made you speak tonight?”
Nella looked toward the door.
“She hit me.”
Not anger.
Clarity.
“She wasn’t afraid Mrs. Ashenford was confused.”
Nella’s voice steadied.
“She was afraid she wasn’t.”
Exactly.
Then Nella told me something else.
Mother’s memory lapses were unpredictable.
But certain cues brought Lucian back.
A cologne one guest wore.
A blue medicine bottle in the bathroom.
A song from fifteen years ago.
And Davina.
Always Davina.
Mother might forget breakfast.
Then see my fiancée and say:
“You came with the angry man.”
Davina laughed it off.
Until Mother added:
“Blue pills.”
That changed everything.
“Tonight she said more?”
Nella nodded.
Before dinner, Mother suddenly remembered Lucian’s face clearly.
She told Nella:
“He came to make Aldric tell the truth.”
“What truth?”
Nella did not know.
Mother forgot before finishing.
Bellmoor, probably.
But I needed more than Davina’s version now.
My father could no longer speak.
Lucian could no longer speak.
Mother could speak only in fragments.
That left people who had been present around the edges.
Old staff.
Drivers.
Men who remembered Bellmoor.
I had spent years calling Lucian disloyal.
May you like
Before deciding what Davina had destroyed—
I needed to know whether the story that brought her father to my house had ever been true at all.
