The Ledger

"She had someone follow me," Isla said, showing Sebastian the message with a hand that wouldn't stay steady.

"That's not a threat from my grandmother. That's a habit." His jaw tightened. "She's had people watching the edges of this family's secrets longer than I've been alive. I just never thought I'd be the edge."

"I need proof. Real proof — not a birth certificate she can claim was forged, not an old housekeeper's word. Something the Trust itself can't deny."

"There's a ledger." He said it like it cost him something. "Grandmother keeps records of every payment the Trust has made under the table — settlements, the Voss payoff, probably your scholarship's real funding line. It's in the estate library, in a safe only she and I have the code to."

"You'd do that? Risk that, for me?"

"You're my aunt's daughter." He said it simply, like it settled something. "That makes you mine to protect too, whether the family likes it or not."

They went that night, while Dorothea hosted a trustees' dinner three rooms away, laughter and silverware drifting faintly down the corridor as Sebastian's fingers moved over the safe's keypad. The ledger was heavier than Isla expected, leather-bound, decades of entries in three different handwritings.

She found the page almost immediately — 1998, a payment logged simply as "R.V. — resolution, final," a sum that turned her stomach, and beneath it, in smaller, more recent handwriting: "I. Marchetti — scholarship, ongoing — do not disclose source."

Proof. Undeniable, in Dorothea's own hand.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor, too close, too fast to be a wandering guest.

"That's not a guest walk," Sebastian whispered. "That's her walk."

Isla shoved the ledger into her bag as the study door handle began to turn.