Chapter 2 - THE LETTER FROM EMILY
Lucas carried Lily into the mansion’s library.
Margaret followed.
Vanessa attempted to enter, but Lucas stopped her at the door.
“You will wait outside.”
Vanessa’s expression hardened.
“This is my wedding.”
“No.”
Lucas looked toward the ballroom.
“This wedding is over.”
The words spread through the guests like a shock wave.
Vanessa stared at him.
“You cannot humiliate me this way because of something a frightened child said.”
Lucas looked at Lily’s bruised wrist.
“I am not humiliating you.”
“I am protecting my daughter.”
He closed the library door.
Margaret placed Emily’s envelope on the desk.
The paper had yellowed around the edges.
Lucas touched his late wife’s handwriting with shaking fingers.
“Why did you keep this from me?”
“Because Emily asked me to.”
Margaret’s voice was quiet.
“She believed someone was watching you after her death.”
“She told me to wait until you began asking the right questions.”
Lucas broke the seal.
Inside were six handwritten pages and a small brass key.
The first line made his heart stop.
Lucas, if you are reading this, I failed to come home.
Lily sat beside him.
He did not want to read the letter aloud, but she reached for his hand.
“Mommy wanted us to know.”
Lucas continued.
Emily wrote that she had uncovered suspicious transfers from the Bennett Family Trust.
Millions of dollars had been moved into companies that did not exist.
The authorization codes belonged to Lucas’s uncle, Richard Bennett, who had managed the family finances for twenty years.
Emily had confronted him.
Richard claimed the transfers were part of a confidential investment strategy.
She did not believe him.
Then Emily discovered that Vanessa had been receiving payments from one of those companies.
Lucas looked up sharply.
“Vanessa knew Emily?”
Margaret nodded.
“They knew each other long before Vanessa met you.”
Emily’s letter explained that Vanessa had worked under a different surname as an event coordinator for the Bennett Foundation.
She had access to the family’s schedules.
She knew when Emily traveled.
She knew when Lucas was away.
Most troubling of all, Emily believed Vanessa had secretly entered the Bennett mansion several times.
Lucas remembered Vanessa telling him they had first met at a charity auction two years after Emily’s death.
That had been a lie.
At the bottom of the final page, Emily had written one last warning.
If anything happens to me, do not trust Richard.
Do not trust the accident report.
And never allow Vanessa Cross near Lily.
Lucas lowered the paper.
The silence became unbearable.
“Why would Vanessa want Lily?”
May you like
Margaret looked toward the brass key.
“Because Lily inherited something Vanessa has spent years trying to steal.”
