taken her to a police station. A powerful man would have ordered an investigation before letting her anywhere near his daughters.
Sebastian was none of those things in that moment. He was only a father with two silent wheelchairs waiting under tall windows.
“Can you help Isla and Maren?” he asked.
June’s face changed at the sound of their names. A shadow crossed it, old and sharp.
“Only if they want to remember,” she said.
“If you help them,” Sebastian said, hearing the desperation in his own voice and not caring who heard it, “I will give you a home.”
June looked past him toward the idling car. “I don’t need a house. I need you to open the wall.”
He brought her home.
By the time they reached Vale House, the rain had softened to a mist that silvered the iron gates. Staff gathered when Sebastian entered with the wet child beside him. Her shoes left small muddy prints across the marble foyer. The cracked yellow suitcase bumped against her knee.
Malcolm Vale appeared at the library entrance, tall, elegant, and coldly immaculate in a charcoal suit. He was Sebastian’s older brother by four years, chief financial officer of the family companies, and the man who had kept the empire running while Sebastian’s world collapsed.
His eyes moved from June’s coat to her suitcase to the key around her neck.
For half a second, his face emptied.
Then disgust covered it.
“What is this?” Malcolm asked.
“A child who needs help,” Sebastian said.
“Then call the proper authorities. Don’t bring her into the house.”
June shifted closer to Sebastian, but she did not lower her gaze.
Malcolm noticed. His jaw tightened.
“Paul,” Sebastian said to the driver, “ask Rosa to bring towels and hot tea. Then have the girls brought to the sitting room.”
Malcolm stepped forward. “Sebastian, this is not wise. Isla and Maren are fragile. You cannot expose them to every tragic stranger who tells you a story.”
“I haven’t told him the story yet,” June said.
Malcolm looked at her as if she had spoken out of turn at a royal table.
Sebastian heard something beneath his brother’s irritation. Not anger. Fear.
The sitting room had once been Celia’s favorite room. She had filled it with soft blue chairs, books with cracked spines, bowls of oranges, and the old upright piano she refused to replace because its middle C had character. After the fire, Sebastian had changed nothing. Even the wool blanket over the sofa remained folded the way Celia used to fold it, corner tucked under, never quite square.
Isla and Maren were wheeled in by their nurse.
Both girls stopped when they saw June.
Maren’s hands tightened around the blanket on her lap. Isla looked first at the key, then at June’s face.
“Daddy,” Isla whispered, “who is she?”
Sebastian knelt between their chairs. “Her name is June. She says she knew this house before the fire.”
Maren’s eyes filled with tears so quickly it frightened him.
“No,” she said. “No, no.”
June set her suitcase down gently. “I didn’t come to scare you.”
Malcolm stood near the doorway with his arms folded. “Too late.”
Sebastian turned. “Leave if you can’t be quiet.”
His brother’s mouth tightened, but he stayed.
June opened the suitcase.
