Georgina's Truth

She opened the door already dressed, like she'd been expecting someone, and when she saw the letter in my hand her face didn't do the polite arranging it usually did around family. It just went still, the way a held breath goes still.

"You'd better come in," she said.

Her kitchen was small and warm and smelled like cinnamon. She didn't offer me tea. She sat across from me at a table barely big enough for two mugs and folded her hands the exact way Ingrid did in the lawyer's office, and for one disorienting second I saw the family resemblance in a woman I'd never once thought of as family.

"Emory was my brother," she said. "Younger than me by six years. Sharpest, kindest man I ever knew, and your grandfather loved him for eleven years before I ever came to work in this house."

I didn't say anything. I don't think I could have.

"Your grandfather hired me in 'seventy-four. Told everyone I answered an ad in the paper. Truth is he came and found me himself, three towns over, and asked if I'd let him take care of me the way he never got to take care of Emory." She said it plainly, no self-pity in it, like she'd made peace with the sentence a long time ago. "I said yes. What else was I going to do. He was drowning in guilt and I needed the work."

"Guilt for what?" I asked. "What happened Tuesday night?"

Georgina's mouth went thin. She looked toward the window, toward the main house visible through the trees, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped somewhere colder.

"Your family's told a story for fifty years about a business fight that split this family down the middle. About Ingrid, mostly — how she couldn't be trusted, how something happened with the company shares nobody quite explains right." She turned back to me. "That story's not true, Miss Nina. And it was never about Ingrid at all."

"Then who?"

Georgina held my gaze steady, not flinching from it. "It was your father. He's the reason my brother left this town and never once came back."