What Helena Saw
He didn't die. Not that night. The doctors got him back after ninety seconds that Odette would remember for the rest of her life, and by dawn he was stable again, unconscious, tethered to more machines than before.
I helped him move her. She hadn't slept, hadn't eaten, and the sentence wouldn't stop looping.
She found Anders in the kitchen at seven, already dressed for a day of pretending nothing was wrong, a habit their family had elevated to art. Her cousin had Gerald's confidence without Gerald's restraint, and he didn't bother softening it.
"I heard you went to see some retired cop," he said, not looking up from his coffee. "Heard you took Abel's things without asking."
"They were evidence, Anders."
"Evidence of what? A sad old man rambling on his deathbed?" He finally looked at her, and there was something almost pleading under the irritation. "Whatever you think you're chasing — leave it. Grandfather built everything we have. You start dragging thirty-year-old ghosts through the papers, we lose the company, the house, all of it. For what? A story nobody can even prove."
"For the truth."
"The truth doesn't pay the staff." He stood, chair scraping. "Drop it, Odette. I mean it."
She found her mother alone an hour later in the greenhouse Celeste's photograph had been taken outside of, thirty years and a lifetime ago. Helena's hands trembled around a pair of pruning shears she wasn't using.
"I saw him once," Helena said, before Odette could ask anything. "Your grandfather. Years after — burning letters in the fireplace, late at night. I was maybe sixteen. I never asked what they were."
"Mom—"
"But that's the thing, Odette." Helena's voice cracked wide open, thirty years of careful silence finally splitting. "Letters kept coming. For years after she vanished — birthday cards, addressed to me, signed 'Love, Aunt Celeste.' I used to think it meant she was alive somewhere."
She finally looked up, eyes wet and terrified.
"But if he was the one burning her letters," Helena whispered, "then who was the one writing them?"