R. V.
The search returned nothing useful — puff pieces, a museum wing dedication, a hedge fund press release. The Corvins were experts at being uninteresting in public.
She tried again: Corvin family disowned. Corvin scandal 1990s. Corvin housemaid.
On the fourth page of results, buried in a scanned society column from a defunct regional paper, she found a single paragraph.
"Sources close to the Corvin estate confirm that Miss R. V., long a fixture at family functions, will no longer be associated with the household. The family declines to comment further."
R. V.
Isla's stomach turned before her brain caught up.
Her mother's name, before she married Isla's father and became Marchetti, had been Rosalind Voss.
She sat back from the laptop like it had bitten her.
It could be a coincidence. Voss wasn't an impossibly rare name. She told herself that twice, and didn't believe it either time.
She kept looking — yearbooks, obituaries, old estate photographs digitized by a local historical society. Two hours of scrolling grainy images of croquet lawns and garden parties later, she found it: a photograph captioned Summer Gala, the Corvin Estate, a cluster of guests in white linen.
At the edge of the frame, half-cropped, half-smiling, stood a young woman with her mother's exact eyes.
Isla zoomed until the pixels broke apart. It was her. Younger, careless, laughing at something out of frame — a version of Rosalind she had never once seen in real life.
Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother, upstairs, two rooms away, as if she'd felt the search through the walls:
Delete whatever you're looking at. Please.
Instead of deleting anything, Isla opened a new tab and typed: how to request estate archive access — Corvin Family Trust.
A confirmation box popped up almost instantly, the contact form auto-filling with data it should never have had: her student ID, her scholarship file number, her home address.
They already knew exactly who she was.