What the Housekeeper Kept
Sebastian found her outside Pruitt's building, waiting like he'd known exactly where she'd be.
"He threatened you." Not a question.
"Politely. With a folder."
"That's Pruitt's whole personality." He fell into step beside her, none of the gala charm left in his face. "There's someone you should talk to. Odalys. Estate staff thirty years ago — practically raised my father, and yours, apparently, before either of us knew what that meant. She left when I was a kid. Grandmother doesn't know I still visit her."
Odalys lived two hours outside the city, in a small house crowded with houseplants and photographs. She was past seventy, sharp-eyed, and studied Isla a long moment before speaking.
"You have his jaw," she said finally. "Alaric's. God help you."
"You knew my mother. Rosalind."
"I raised her, near enough, the years they let her live in the main house instead of pretending she didn't exist." Her hands, folding a dish towel, went still. "There were good years, when Alaric doted on her. And there were the other years. After Dorothea found out."
"What happened in the other years?"
Odalys was quiet long enough that Isla thought she wouldn't answer.
"There's a reason I kept records," she finally said, "back when nobody would've believed a housekeeper's word against a family like that." She rose, slow on her knees, and pulled a shoebox from a closet shelf — old doctor's notes, a child's school reports with unexplained absences circled in red, a single Polaroid of a little girl's arm in a splint that nobody in the family had ever taken her to a hospital for.
"I'm not saying it to frighten you," Odalys said, setting the box in Isla's hands like it weighed more than paper should. "I'm saying it because your mother spent thirty years protecting you from a house that once made very sure nobody asked questions about a child who kept getting hurt in ways nobody could quite explain."
Isla's phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number, sent, she'd realize a second later, from somewhere very close to Dorothea Corvin.
We know where you are, Isla. Come home before you make a mistake you can't undo.