photograph showed the green stairs as they had been before the fire. Four children sat on the steps: Isla, Maren, June, and a small boy Sebastian did not recognize. Behind them stood Celia, smiling with one hand on June’s shoulder and the other on the shoulder of a woman in a housekeeper’s dress.
Sebastian recognized the woman vaguely. Eliza Ward. A seamstress who had worked in the house during Celia’s charity gala season. The official fire report had named her as the careless employee who left a heater near old curtains and fled before the alarm.
She had been blamed for almost everything.
“My mother,” June said.
Sebastian looked at her. “Eliza was your mother?”
June nodded. “She didn’t start the fire. She tried to stop it.”
Malcolm’s voice cut in. “This is obscene. A child repeats accusations she cannot possibly understand, and you all stand here indulging her.”
Sebastian slowly rose, lifting Isla into her chair. His hands were gentle with his daughter, but when he turned to his brother, there was nothing gentle left in his face.
“Be quiet.”
Malcolm’s eyes flashed. “You are grieving again. That’s what this is. You want meaning, so you’ll believe a street child with a toy bird.”
“I believed you,” Sebastian said. “For twenty-two months.”
The words landed hard.
June held out the brass key. “There is a room behind the wall at the top of the green stairs. Mrs. Vale found papers there. My mother sewed the curtains in that room because no one else used it. She saw where Mrs. Vale hid them.”
“What papers?” Sebastian asked.
June looked at Malcolm. “The ones that made him angry.”
Maren’s voice came small and broken. “Mommy said Uncle Malcolm was stealing from us.”
Malcolm went still.
Sebastian felt the floor tilt under him.
The companies. The trusts. The complicated signatures Malcolm had placed before him during the months after Celia’s death. The transactions Sebastian had barely read because his daughters were in hospital beds and his wife was in a cemetery.
He looked toward his head of security, who stood pale near the hall.
“Seal the exits,” Sebastian said. “Take Malcolm’s phone. Call Detective Harrow. Tell him the Vale fire is being reopened tonight.”
Malcolm laughed, but the sound came out wrong. “You cannot imprison me in my own brother’s house.”
“This is my house,” Sebastian said.
For a heartbeat, Malcolm’s polished mask vanished. Rage showed beneath it, old and ugly.
Then he moved.
Not toward the door.
Toward June.
Sebastian was fast, but grief and shock slowed him. Malcolm crossed half the carpet before anyone reacted. June stepped back, hitting the edge of the piano bench.
Isla screamed.
Then she stood.
It was not graceful. It was not the miracle paintings promised. Her knees knocked together. Her face went bloodless. Her hands clutched the blanket at her waist. But she rose from her wheelchair with a cry that seemed to tear out of the locked room inside her body.
“Don’t touch her!” Isla shouted.
Malcolm stopped as if the child had struck him.
Sebastian caught him by the arm and twisted him back. Security reached them a second later. Malcolm fought once, then went rigid as two guards held him.
Maren stared at her sister.
“Isla,” she whispered.
Isla swayed. Sebastian
