Chapter 5
Margaret sat at the guesthouse table with both hands around a cup of coffee she had not touched.
“I knew about the notes.”
Galen looked at her.
“How long?”
“About three months.”
He waited.
Margaret seemed to expect anger.
When it did not come, she looked more ashamed.
“Ainsley told me Dr. Levin wanted observations.”
“Hannah never asked for them.”
“I know that now.”
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
Margaret looked toward the boxes.
“Because every time I questioned something involving the wedding, Nolan reminded me who would be running the household after you remarried.”
Galen understood what she meant.
Margaret was fifty-eight.
Her husband had died six years earlier.
Her salary and health insurance came through Moretti Household Management.
She believed challenging Ainsley might cost her job.
That did not excuse the silence.
But it made it human.
Margaret opened one box.
Inside was Sofia’s blue scarf.
“Eira cried for this for almost an hour.”
Galen remembered that night.
Ainsley had told him Eira had become hysterical after seeing an old photograph.
He had believed her.
The photograph had not caused the crying.
Its disappearance had.
One by one, old incidents changed shape.
Eira refusing breakfast after Sofia’s music box vanished.
Eira screaming before preschool after her mother’s scarf disappeared.
Eira hiding beneath a table during a dress fitting because Ainsley had removed the locket.
Each event had been described to Galen as proof that Sofia’s memory prevented Eira from adjusting.
Now the sequence looked reversed.
Margaret handed him another sheet.
This one was not a behavior log.
It was a typed recommendation draft.
The title read:
POST-WEDDING TRANSITION PLAN FOR EIRA.
It proposed moving Eira’s bedroom out of the main family wing, placing most of Sofia’s belongings in long-term storage, and limiting “grief-reinforcing rituals.”
No doctor had signed it.
No therapist had written it.
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At the bottom, in small print, was a file author.
Nolan Vale.
