The Reading of the Will
Twenty Years Late

Don't Trust Him With What's Left of You

August 25, 2026 · Part 9 of 10 · 2 min

The rest of the letter blurred through tears Imogen didn't remember starting to cry. Her mother had written three pages — plans for an apartment above a bakery two towns over, a list of things to pack in one bag, a single line about *finally telling someone the truth about the stairs last spring, and about what I've started to notice with Imogen, which I can no longer call clumsiness* — and beneath all of it, at the very bottom, a promise.

*I'm not running because I'm weak. I'm running so she never has to learn what I let myself get used to. If anything happens before I can go, find Odalys. She's the only one who never looked away.*

Imogen lowered the pages and looked at her father, really looked at him, in a way she hadn't let herself do in twenty years of Sunday dinners and Father's Day cards and toasts about how well he'd raised her alone.

"What happened on the stairs," she said. Not a question anymore.

Gideon sat down heavily in the armchair Imogen had vacated, and for a long moment he looked less like a man defending himself and more like one setting down something he'd been carrying too long to remember not carrying it.

"We argued," he said finally, to the floor. "She told me she was leaving that night, not in two days like she'd planned — that night, with you, while I was still deciding what that meant for me. I followed her up the stairs to stop her from waking you to pack. I grabbed her arm." His voice had gone flat, rehearsed, worn smooth by two decades of telling it to no one. "She pulled away harder than I expected. She fell. I told myself for twenty years that pulling away isn't the same as pushing."

"Did you call for help right away?" Odalys asked, very quietly.

Gideon didn't answer that at all, and the silence answered for him.

Outside, tires crunched fast up the gravel drive, and blue light swept once across the living room ceiling before the engine cut. Odalys didn't look surprised. She'd clearly made a call from that desk before Imogen had even knocked.

A knock came at the door — firm, official, unhurried.

"Gideon Faraday? We need you to come with us. There's new evidence in the death of Rosalind Faraday."

Continue the story Part 10: The Ring on My Finger →

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