Chapter 2
Isabella denied nothing after that.
Good.
I had no patience left for fragments.
She first learned about Eleanor’s letters eighteen months earlier.
Not from Bunny.
From my desk.
There had been five letters there.
I remembered them.
Eleanor wrote them during the final months of her illness.
Simple things.
One about Charlotte.
One about my mother.
One about the foundation.
Two for me.
After the funeral, I locked them away because reading her handwriting felt like opening a wound with my own hands.
Then Isabella came into my life.
At first, legitimately.
We met at a Sterling Foundation board dinner.
She was funny.
Beautiful.
Unimpressed by my surname.
At least that was what I believed.
Three months into our relationship, she found one of Eleanor’s letters while looking for stationery in my study.
“By accident?”
Isabella swallowed.
“The first one.”
Only the first.
She read it.
Then another.
Then all five.
Why?
Because Eleanor fascinated her.
That was the word she used.
Not jealousy.
Not yet.
She wanted to understand the woman whose absence filled my house.
Then fascination became study.
Eleanor wrote about me intimately.
What frightened me.
What made me withdraw.
How I acted when angry.
Which memories softened me.
How I hated being touched when overwhelmed but wanted someone nearby anyway.
Private knowledge accumulated during twelve years of marriage.
Isabella absorbed it in an afternoon.
Then used it slowly.
Not as a script at first.
That was her defense.
She simply knew when to remain silent.
What music to avoid.
Which anniversary would hurt.
What food I hated despite pretending otherwise.
I thought she understood me unusually quickly.
She did.
Because Eleanor taught her.
“How many times did you go back?”
Isabella looked down.
“Seven.”
Marcus swore softly.
Even he had not known the number.
“You copied them?”
“Yes.”
“Photographed?”
“No.”
She wrote notes.
Of course.
Then she returned every letter exactly where I left it.
I never knew.
Eventually Isabella began noticing references to “the Bunny letters.”
More letters.
Dozens.
Hidden somewhere Charlotte always carried.
She became obsessed with finding them.
Not because she feared business secrets.
There were none.
She feared Eleanor had written something else about the kind of woman I should marry.
Something that could expose what Isabella had already done.
I stared at her.
“You didn’t know what was in them.”
“No.”
“You locked Charlotte in a wall over letters you had never read.”
Isabella cried harder.
May you like
“I knew enough.”
That frightened me more than if she had known everything.
