Chapter 6 - THE TORN PHOTOGRAPH
The wind howled through the pines, but I couldn't feel the cold. I was paralyzed by what I'd just heard through the glass.
Dante grabbed my shoulder, his grip tight enough to bruise. He had heard it too.
On the day I was born.
Mary wasn't just the housekeeper. She was the third child. She was Dante and Julian's older sister.
Inside the cabin, Julian stumbled backward, hitting the edge of the coffee table. "No," he stammered. "No, that's impossible. You're the cook. You've worked for us since I was a kid."
"I was twenty-two when your mother brought me into the house," Mary said, her voice steady but laced with decades of hidden grief. "She had me when she was seventeen. Her parents forced her to give me up to a local family. But she always kept track of me. When my adoptive parents died, she hired me. It was the only way she could keep me close without ruining her marriage to your father."
Celeste scoffed, a vicious, ugly sound. "You expect us to believe that? You're a maid claiming to be a billionaire's daughter."
"I don't want the money," Mary said, touching the emerald. "I never did. When she got sick, she wrote the new will leaving everything to me. I begged her not to. I knew what it would do to Dante. He built the company alongside his father. It belonged to him."
"Then why keep the vault?" Julian demanded.
"Because she was my mother," Mary's voice finally cracked. "And the documents in that box are the only proof I ever existed to her. I kept the key hidden so you couldn't destroy my history."
Dante didn't wait anymore. He kicked the front door with the flat of his boot.
The heavy wood splintered and slammed open. Dante stormed into the room, wet and furious, with me right behind him.
Julian scrambled backward. Celeste screamed.
Dante didn't look at either of them. He walked straight to Mary and knelt in front of her chair. He looked at the emerald necklace, then up into the face of the woman who had served him dinner for twenty-eight years.
Tears tracked through the powdered sugar still dusted faintly on her collar from the engagement cake.
"Mary," Dante choked out.
"I'm sorry, Dante," she cried. "I never wanted to hurt you."
Dante reached out and pulled her into his arms, burying his face in her shoulder. "You're my sister," he whispered. "You're my sister and you've been eating in the kitchen."
Julian lunged.
He grabbed a heavy iron fireplace poker and swung it toward Dante's back.
"Dante!" I screamed.
I shoved a wooden side table into Julian's path. He tripped, the poker smashing into the floorboards instead of Dante's skull. Dante spun around, grabbed Julian by the collar, and slammed him against the log wall, pinning him by the throat.
"You lay a hand on my family again," Dante snarled in Julian's face, "and I'll kill you."
Celeste backed toward the open door, realizing she had lost. She reached into her designer purse.
"It doesn't matter," Celeste spat, her face twisted in a panicked sneer. "You have the key, but we found the rest of the ledger in Mary's desk. And I found this."
She pulled out a jagged piece of paper.
It was the photograph torn from the back of the blue ledger.
May you like
"This is the only picture of your mother holding Mary as a baby," Celeste said, backing onto the porch. She pulled a silver lighter from her pocket and sparked the flame. "Without this and the documents I'm going to have my lawyers tie up in probate court for a decade, Mary will never prove who she is. She'll die a servant."
She held the flame to the edge of the photograph.
