The Reading of the Will
Twenty Years Late

The Knock That Wasn't Mine to Answer

August 25, 2026 · Part 7 of 10 · 2 min

Odalys had the letter halfway out of a locked drawer, an envelope gone soft and grey at the edges, when a car door slammed outside hard enough to rattle the front window.

Callum's voice came from the yard, sharp and startled. "Imogen—"

She was on her feet before she understood why, Odalys already moving toward the door with a calm that told Imogen this wasn't the first time she'd braced for this exact knock.

Gideon Faraday didn't knock. He pushed the door open with the flat of his hand, still in his wedding jacket, his face the color of old paper.

"Get in the car," he said to Imogen, not looking at Odalys at all. "We're going. Now."

"Dad, she has a letter from Mom—"

"I don't care what she has." His eyes finally cut to Odalys, and whatever was between them, it was twenty years deep and it wasn't finished. "You had no right. I gave you a very generous settlement for your silence and you took it."

"I took it because I was a housekeeper with no family and no lawyer, and you made it very clear what would happen to my name if I didn't," Odalys said, not raising her voice at all, which somehow made it worse. "I never agreed to keep quiet forever."

"Rosalind fell," Gideon said, louder now, his composure finally cracking down the middle. "She fell down the stairs because she was hysterical, because she'd decided overnight she was taking my daughter and vanishing, and she wasn't thinking straight, and I have spent twenty years grieving a wife who—"

He stopped.

Imogen felt the silence land on her like a dropped weight.

"How do you know that," she said slowly, "if you weren't even home that night?"

Her father, for the first time in Imogen's entire life, had absolutely nothing to say.

Continue the story Part 8: The File She Kept for Twenty Years →

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