Chapter 1
“Whose ashes did you give me, Calista?”
Her mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Behind her, my father’s portrait smiled over a table covered in white flowers.
In front of it sat the urn I had carried myself six months earlier.
My hands remembered its weight.
I hated that.
Tilda remained beside Father’s wheelchair, holding his hand.
He looked smaller than the man in the portrait.
Thinner.
Worn cardigan.
Slippers.
A face I had grieved until I could barely remember how it moved.
But it was him.
The scar beneath his left eyebrow.
The slight bend in his smallest finger.
The way his right eye narrowed before the left when he became angry.
My father.
Alive.
“Calista.”
She looked toward the urn.
Then at me.
“No one.”
The room changed.
I became very still.
“What?”
“The ashes weren’t human.”
Father closed his eyes.
Tilda inhaled sharply.
I stared at the woman I had planned to marry in twelve days.
“What did you burn?”
Calista’s voice came out thin.
“His coat.”
I said nothing.
“His shoes.”
More.
“His walking cane. Some books. The blanket from the cottage.”
The urn suddenly looked obscene.
I had stood beside it while men I had known all my life told stories about Osbert Wynthrop.
I had touched it before leaving the room.
Spoken to it once when nobody was watching.
Not my father.
Clothes.
Wood.
Fabric.
Ash.
“Why?”
Calista started crying.
Father opened his eyes.
“Tell him the rest.”
She looked at him.
Hatred flashed through her fear.
Interesting.
Father continued.
“Tell him why you needed me dead before he married you.”
My jaw tightened.
Calista whispered:
“Because he knew who my mother was.”
I looked from her to Father.
I knew Calista’s mother’s name.
Evelyn Arden.
Dead eighteen years.
A seamstress, according to Calista.
Father gave a hoarse laugh.
“No.”
His fingers tightened around the wheelchair.
“Evelyn Arden was my maid.”
Calista’s face hardened.
Then Father looked at me.
“And I destroyed her life.”
The memorial room went silent for a second time.
Only now I understood.
May you like
Calista had not hidden my father because she feared what he knew about her.
She had hidden him because she wanted him to remember what he had done to someone no one in this family had bothered remembering at all.
