Old Money
The Unsigned Wife

No Other Copy

August 25, 2026 · Part 9 of 10 · 2 min

Garrick did not deny visiting the study. He didn't deny much of anything, which was somehow worse than if he'd tried.

"I visited my dying brother," he said, spreading his hands in Ostrow's office the next morning, all patience and reasonable tone. "Forgive me for not asking your permission first."

"Nobody's asking about visits," Roman said. "We're asking what you took out of his desk."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"The letter references an attached signature page," Ostrow said carefully. "A page that isn't attached. Written six weeks before your brother died, during a period in which, by your own admission, you were alone in that study on at least three occasions."

"Circumstantial," Garrick said. "You have no proof I touched anything."

"No," Odessa agreed. "We don't."

Something in her voice made him look at her properly for the first time that morning.

"But my husband did," she said. "He told Constance not to trust you with this eleven years ago, before any of us knew there was anything to trust you with. He didn't do that for no reason, Garrick. I think he knew exactly what you'd do the moment he was gone, and I think that's why he made sure the page you took was never the only copy."

For the first time, something flickered across Garrick's face that wasn't composure.

"There is no other copy," he said, too fast.

Ostrow's phone rang. He answered, listened, and set it down slowly.

"That was Constance Byrne," he said. "She's had a certified duplicate of the signature page in a safety deposit box for eleven years. Your brother's instructions, apparently — never let one person hold the only proof of anything that mattered."

Garrick's jaw tightened.

"Unfortunately," Ostrow continued, "with a fraud allegation now on the table, releasing it requires a court order, not a courtesy call to a bank manager. I've already requested an emergency hearing."

"When," Odessa asked.

"Tomorrow morning. Nine o'clock." Ostrow looked at Garrick, and for a lawyer who'd spent the morning studiously neutral, his voice carried an edge now that hadn't been there before. "I'd suggest everyone be there."

Continue the story Part 10: Schedule C →

More stories

What the Willow Knew

When a dying groundskeeper's deathbed confession reopens her family's decades-old cold case, Odette Marlow digs up a shocking secret her powerful grandfather has spent thirty years burying in the garden.

What the Nightingale Kept

When an appraiser recognizes a dead servant's stolen family jewel on an auction block, she risks everything to prove her wrongly disgraced ancestor never stole it — and to expose the century-old secret a wealthy family paid in silence to bury.

Under a Broken Crown

A scholarship student discovers that her mysterious benefactor is the very aristocratic family that secretly erased her mother decades ago — and must decide whether the truth is worth a fight, or whether the money was always hers to walk away with.

Two Cribs, One Lie

An eighteenth-birthday DNA test tells an heiress she isn't her parents' biological daughter — and unravels a nanny's decades-old scheme to smuggle her own bloodline into a fortune she was never allowed to inherit.

Thirty Years at the Wheel

After thirty loyal years behind the wheel, a family's driver is thrown out like garbage by an entitled young heir — never suspecting the old man he just humiliated has kept proof of the family patriarch's deadliest cover-up for three decades, and is finally ready to use it.

The Second Son

When the housekeeper's son who has spent his life secretly rescuing the family heir from ruin is publicly thrown to the wolves, the aging patriarch reveals a shocking truth: he's known everything for twenty years — and has quietly been grooming the fixer, not his own son, to inherit it all.