Delayed

"I was twenty-six," Odessa said, before Constance could continue, because suddenly she remembered all of it, whole and cold. "Newly married. Six months in. I found the loan paperwork by accident, looking for our marriage license to send to my own mother, and instead found collateral documents with the trust's assets pledged against a debt neither of you—" she nodded at Roman and Thalia, not yet born then, not that it mattered "—would ever have known you'd lost."

"So you went to the bank," Roman said.

"I offered my own inheritance. Land my grandmother left me, free and clear, worth enough to buy the loan officers time. But there was a problem." She looked at Constance, who nodded for her to keep going. "The bank's auditors were already circling your father for the collateral irregularity. If I'd shown up as his newly registered wife, my land would have been treated as a marital asset, tangled in the same audit, frozen along with everything else. Useless."

"So what did you do," Thalia whispered.

"Aldric asked me to hold the marriage filing back. Delay it past the ceremony, past the deadline if I had to. Let my land stand as an unmarried woman's separate property, clean, untouchable by his mess. Buy the time. Fix it after."

"And after?" Roman's voice had gone very quiet.

"After, there was a company again, and a husband too relieved and too ashamed to ever bring it back up, and a filing that simply never got made correctly, and then years, and then children, and then it was just — the marriage. Nobody questioned it. I didn't even remember to be afraid of it until three days ago."

Constance finally unlocked the cabinet. Inside sat a small fireproof box, and inside that, a single document — the correction filing Roman had seen initials for, C.B., dated eleven years back, exactly as promised.

But clipped behind it was something none of them expected: a second, newer page, dated barely six weeks before Aldric's death.

And it was missing its final line — the signature.