Part 2
For a few seconds, no one spoke.
Dylan stared at the photograph on the counter as if it had been pulled from the bottom of a grave. The younger version of him in the image looked thinner, sharper, with longer hair and a leather jacket I had never seen. He stood across the street from my mother’s old apartment, his head turned toward the second-floor window where she and I had lived.
Ten years before he had supposedly met me at a bookstore.
Ten years before he had smiled over a stack of used novels and said, “You look like someone who knows where the good stories are.”
My stomach twisted.
“You followed me,” I whispered.
Dylan’s eyes lifted to mine.
“Claire, listen to me.”
“No.” My voice cracked, but I did not look away. “You knew who I was before you ever spoke to me.”
His mouth opened, then closed.
Edmund Quillan slid the photograph back into the folder with careful fingers. “Mr. Harper, this shop is under private security. The authorities have already been notified.”
Dylan gave a short laugh, but it sounded hollow. “Authorities? For what? Standing outside an apartment ten years ago?”
“For fraud,” Edmund said. “Conspiracy. Attempted coercion. And possibly much more, once we know why your family has been watching Miss Pearson since childhood.”
Dylan’s face changed at the word family.
There it was again.
A crack.
“Your father,” Edmund continued, “was an associate of Lionel Voss, the attorney who tried to seize the Ashborne estate after Margaret disappeared.”
I gripped the edge of the counter harder.
“Who is Lionel Voss?”
Dylan looked at me quickly. “Don’t listen to him.”
Edmund did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
“Lionel Voss was Theodore Quillan’s former legal adviser. He drafted the original trust documents, then attempted to alter them after Margaret vanished. When the court refused, he claimed Margaret was dead. When that failed, he claimed she was mentally unfit. When that failed too, he disappeared from public practice.”
The jeweler, silent until now, turned the necklace under the lamp. The blue pendant caught the light like deep water.
Edmund looked at Dylan. “And ten years later, Voss’s protégé’s son married Margaret’s daughter.”
Dylan’s jaw flexed.
I stepped back from him as though something poisonous had spilled between us.
“Our whole marriage,” I said. “Was any of it real?”
For the first time, Dylan looked almost angry that I had asked.
“Nine years is a long time to fake a life.”