Chapter 6
The question remained.
Why?
Not how.
Bianca had opportunity.
Knowledge of passages.
Margaret’s obedience.
My reputation.
But why erase Evelyn?
Jealousy alone could explain cruelty.
Not eleven months of work.
Evelyn knew.
She waited until Ethan left.
Then said:
“The morning of our wedding, I found Clara’s letters.”
My son’s biological mother.
Dead when Ethan was four months old.
I had not heard Clara’s name in weeks.
Not because forbidden.
Because grief quieted over time.
“What letters?”
Evelyn looked at me carefully.
“The ones Bianca told you Clara destroyed.”
My breathing slowed.
After Clara died, I searched for letters she had mentioned writing to Ethan.
Messages for birthdays.
Future questions.
His first heartbreak.
His first day of school.
She had been sick enough to think ahead.
Bianca told me Clara changed her mind.
Burned them because they were too sad.
I believed her.
Why would my sister lie about a dying woman’s letters?
Evelyn found them accidentally inside an old cedar chest in Bianca’s dressing room while searching for a family lace piece for the wedding.
Twenty-three envelopes.
Ethan’s name on each.
Sealed.
Clara’s handwriting.
“What did they say?”
“I opened none.”
Good.
“They weren’t mine.”
Exactly.
Evelyn confronted Bianca.
Bianca panicked.
Why keep them?
At first, Bianca said Clara asked her to.
False.
Then she admitted something.
Clara had written one separate letter to me.
Not sealed when Bianca found it.
She read it.
Inside, Clara asked me to promise one thing:
Do not let Bianca raise Ethan if I die.
My entire body went still.
“Why?”
Evelyn shook her head.
“She didn’t explain fully in the part Bianca showed me.”
Showed?
Bianca had kept that page too.
Evelyn saw only a fragment before Bianca grabbed it.
Enough.
Clara distrusted my sister around the baby.
She had apparently witnessed Bianca becoming possessive.
Calling Ethan “our boy.”
Overruling nannies.
Telling Clara she was too weak to understand what he needed.
After Clara died, Bianca became indispensable.
She helped me survive.
Helped raise Ethan.
And buried the one request that might have made me keep distance.
Then Evelyn entered.
Ethan bonded with her.
Bianca lost the role she had stolen from a dying woman.
May you like
On the wedding morning Evelyn found proof.
That was why she could not reach the altar.
