“Not hard enough to mention it.”
“You weren’t listening yet.”
Noah laughed sharply. “That is a dangerous thing to say in my house.”
Amara stepped closer now, her voice low and steady. “Then let me say something safer. Your wife was afraid before she died.”
Every muscle in Noah’s body locked.
“Afraid of what?”
Amara held his gaze. “She didn’t trust the accident to stay an accident.”
For the next twelve hours Noah moved through his own life like a man carrying lit gasoline.
He did not sleep.
He read.
He called names he had not called in years.
He had Russell pull financial records from the Ava Ashford Foundation, the charitable arm Noah had established after the twins were born and mostly handed off to his mother and CFO to manage during the family’s recovery period. He ordered archived marina maintenance logs from Nantucket. He requested chain-of-custody records on evidence collected from the wreck.
And for the first time since Ava’s funeral, he opened the locked cedar box in the back of his closet containing her personal effects.
Inside were silk scarves, two rings, a leather journal with several pages ripped out, a rosary with one broken bead, and a folded note in Ava’s handwriting he had somehow never seen because it had slipped beneath the box lining.
Noah unfolded it with hands that did not feel connected to him.
If anything happens to me, do not let Geneva make the girls afraid of the truth.
No date.
No explanation.
Just one sentence, written with enough pressure to leave marks on the paper below it.
Noah sat down hard on the edge of the bed.
He had spent nearly three years protecting the structure around his grief because the structure was all that remained standing. His mother handled the press. Damian Cross, his longtime CFO, handled the company. Lawyers handled insurance. doctors handled the girls. Noah handled surviving.
Now every one of those arrangements looked less like support and more like containment.
At breakfast, Geneva noticed his face and mistook the reason.
“This is what I warned you about,” she said as though resuming a conversation in which she had already won. “That woman has dragged your mind into superstition and paranoia.”
Noah buttered toast he did not intend to eat. “You turned someone away from this house after Ava died.”
Geneva’s expression did not change quickly enough.
“People came out of the woodwork after the funeral,” she said. “Climbers, opportunists, the emotionally unstable. I protected you.”
“Did Philip Voss call one of them and threaten arrest?”
Geneva laid down her knife. “You’re interrogating me over breakfast because of a maid?”
“She wasn’t a maid when Ava knew her.”
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