Chapter 12
Orson eventually met Evelyn again.
This time he brought no investigator.
Only coffee.
“I owe you an apology.”
She looked surprised.
“For what?”
“My family made you carry something that belonged to all of them.”
Evelyn stared out the diner window.
“I left.”
“You tried to speak.”
“They didn’t want to hear it.”
“My father paid your final contract and required confidentiality.”
“That was his lawyer’s idea.”
“It was still my family.”
Evelyn studied him.
“You were thirty-two when Luca died.”
“I was old enough to ask questions.”
“You were told a child got sick and died.”
“I accepted the easiest version.”
Evelyn shook her head.
“Don’t make yourself guilty because you’re angry at people who were there.”
That sentence mattered.
Orson had spent weeks discovering other people’s failures.
He was beginning to turn accountability into another form of control—assigning guilt everywhere because uncertainty felt intolerable.
Evelyn continued.
“Tamsin loved Luca. That’s what makes it awful.”
Orson nodded.
“She loved him and still failed him.”
“Yes.”
“Both can be true.”
“They usually are.”
When Orson returned home, Mara was asleep on the couch with a picture book on her stomach.
The new house was quieter than the estate.
He realized he preferred it.
No constant foot traffic.
No relatives arriving without warning.
No men discussing territory within hearing distance of a nursery.
He had moved Mara temporarily.
Now he began considering whether they should ever return.
That possibility upset the family more than Tamsin’s legal case.
The Bellori estate represented continuity.
Orson had inherited it from his father.
His father from an uncle.
Children were raised there.
Deals were made there.
Portraits covered the halls.
May you like
Orson looked at Mara sleeping.
A house could contain history without deserving another generation.
