Chapter 2
I did not question Evelyn immediately.
Food first.
Water.
A physician.
Warm clothes.
A locked bedroom door she controlled from inside.
Choice matters differently after someone has spent eleven months without enough of it.
Ethan refused to leave the hallway.
He sat outside her room holding the wooden E.
I sat beside him.
“You remember it?”
He nodded.
“Evie make tower.”
That memory hit harder than I expected.
Before the wedding, Evelyn and Ethan built alphabet towers every evening.
After she disappeared, the blocks vanished too.
Bianca told me staff donated them because Ethan stopped playing with them.
Another small fact suddenly rotten.
“Did you see Evie after the wedding?”
He frowned.
Three-year-olds do not organize time well.
Then:
“Under floor?”
My breathing stopped.
“What?”
He pointed toward the bridal suite.
“Lady sing.”
I stared.
“What lady?”
“Evie song.”
Bianca had told everyone Ethan developed nightmares after Evelyn left.
Sometimes he cried near the bridal hallway.
Sometimes he said he heard singing.
We called it grief.
A toddler’s imagination.
What if he actually heard her?
I stood.
Found Anna.
“Who cleaned that suite?”
“Almost nobody, Boss.”
Bianca had ordered it preserved.
That was supposedly because I found the room painful.
I had never issued that order.
Of course.
“Who had access?”
Anna hesitated.
“Miss Bianca.”
There it was.
And one older housekeeper.
Margaret Doyle.
Sixty-six.
Worked for us twenty-eight years.
Retired three months after the wedding.
Bianca told me arthritis finally forced her out.
I asked where Margaret lived now.
No one knew.
That bothered me.
Then the physician came out.
“Evelyn wants to speak.”
I entered alone.
She sat against pillows wearing one of Anna’s spare robes.
Her hair had been cut unevenly.
Not styled.
Cut because long hair becomes difficult when survival is practical.
I sat.
No touching until she offered her hand.
She did.
“What happened?”
Evelyn looked toward the door.
Then:
“Bianca didn’t put me under the floor on our wedding day.”
Interesting.
“Then who did?”
“No one.”
I waited.
“She put me in the old servants’ rooms beneath the west wing first.”
My jaw tightened.
“How long?”
“Seven months.”
“And after?”
“She moved me under the bridal suite because someone started renovating downstairs.”
I stared.
May you like
There had been an entire hidden service level beneath my house—
and my sister had used it as a prison.
