Until the afternoon I heard voices I was not meant to hear.
I had come to the rear study of the Moretti compound looking for a document. The door was ajar. Two men were speaking on the other side, and the first voice stopped me cold because it belonged to a dead man's brother.
"Julian, the one who died in that wreck was your younger brother. You know that. I know that. You took his name, you took his place, and you've been living as him ever since, all so you could stay close to your brother's wife. Doesn't it keep you up at night? The truth getting out?"
The second voice was quieter. Controlled. The kind of quiet that costs something.
"I couldn't afford to think that far. From the very beginning, the one I loved was Winslow. I only married Bellandi to keep her from ruining Winslow's happiness. I gave her up once. This time, God handed me a second chance, and I am not letting go."
The floor tilted beneath me.
Every surface I had built my grief on cracked at once. Every memory I had treasured, every whispered reassurance in the dark, every morning he had pressed his lips to my temple and called me his. All of it constructed on a lie so complete it had its own heartbeat.
From the beginning, everyone had loved Adrian Winslow. My sister. The pampered younger daughter of the Bellandi bloodline, the one my father presented at every feast night like a jewel on a velvet cloth. Julian's devotion to me had never been devotion at all. It was containment. A way to keep me occupied and quiet while the woman he actually wanted remained safe and adored.
He had not merely preferred her. He had faked his own death. He had stolen his dead brother's name, his identity, his place in the Family, and worn it like a second skin so that he could sit beside her at the table every Sunday and call her sister-in-law while the real sister-in-law wept upstairs over a man who was not even gone.
I could not breathe.
I ran. Out of the study, through the service corridor, past the soldier posted at the garden gate who called after me and got no answer. The rain had started without warning, the way it does on the coast, sudden and vicious, and I went straight into it. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't care. The sound that came out of me did not sound like crying. It sounded like something being torn open from the inside.