“Your grandfather is alive,” he said.
I turned sharply. “You told the jeweler the master had been searching for me.”
“Theodore Quillan. Your mother’s father.”
My throat tightened.
“Why didn’t he find us?”
“Because Margaret was good at disappearing. Better than anyone expected. She changed her name, avoided banks, avoided hospitals when she could, paid cash, moved often. By the time we found a trace, she was gone again.”
“My mother clipped coupons,” I said. “She wasn’t some fugitive mastermind.”
“She was a frightened woman protecting her child.”
I looked down at the pendant.
“What happened to her?”
Edmund’s gaze stayed on the road ahead.
“She was supposed to inherit control of the Ashborne Trust on her twenty-fifth birthday. One week before that, her car was forced off a coastal road. Her husband was with her.”
“My father.”
“Yes.”
I waited.
Edmund’s voice lowered. “His body was recovered. Hers was not. Three months later, your grandfather received an unsigned photograph of Margaret holding you. On the back were the words you saw today.”
Keep her hidden until it is safe.
Safe from whom?
The car turned through iron gates set into a wall of dark stone. Beyond them stood a house so large it barely seemed real. Ashborne House rose from the hill like something carved out of fog and old money, all slate roofs, narrow windows, ivy, and cold symmetry.
My mother had come from this.
My mother, who saved glass jars and patched my school backpack with blue thread.
A woman in a black dress met us at the door. She was thin, severe, and pale, with gray hair pulled into a knot.
“This is Mrs. Vale,” Edmund said. “She manages the house.”
Mrs. Vale looked at me, and her stern face softened for half a second.
“You have her eyes,” she said.
No one had ever told me I had my mother’s eyes. People usually said I looked tired.
Inside, the house smelled of polished wood, old flowers, and rain. Portraits lined the walls. Quillans and Ashbornes stared down at me from gilded frames, their faces proud and distant.
Then I saw her.
My mother.
Not the woman I knew in grocery-store sneakers and faded cardigans, but young Margaret Ashborne Quillan in a silver gown, her chin lifted, the blue pendant resting against her throat.