Helena stepped out quietly and stood over me for a second before sitting beside me on the step above.
“You did good,” she said. “But he’ll come back. Men like Brendan always come back.”
I looked up at her.
“What did he do to Clare?”
Helena’s jaw went hard.
“Things no child should ever have to survive. Her mother tried to protect her. Brendan put her in the hospital. Clare tried to stop him. He turned on her too. She ran with nothing.”
She swallowed once.
“Mr. George found her before Brendan did.”
That sentence did something to me I still struggle to describe. Because inside the fear and the confusion and the furious grief at being kept in the dark, there was suddenly pride. Fierce and painful and undeniable. George had done that. He had found a girl on the edge of disaster and moved her out of its path without telling anyone, without calling himself noble, without asking for credit.
Then Helena said, “There’s something else you need to see,” and led me inside.
George’s office was hidden behind a plain door in the back hallway. Locked, of course. Helena knew where he kept the key—in a false bottom under the kitchen junk drawer, of all places, which was such a George detail I nearly laughed and cried at once.
The room was small, immaculate, and heartbreakingly familiar. The same neat arrangement of pencils. The same stacks of labeled file folders. The same insistence on order that he had in our apartment, only here the order seemed to hum with urgency. Like every system in the room had been built not for comfort but for protection.
Helena went straight to the desk, opened the bottom drawer, pressed something at the back, and lifted out a false panel.
Inside lay a leather-bound journal, several photographs, and a stack of clipped papers.
“You should read,” she said.
My hands shook as I opened the journal. George’s handwriting filled the page—small, slanted, exact. Familiar enough that my throat closed at once.
The first entry I landed on wasn’t about Helena or Clare or any woman currently living on the property.
It was about Patricia.
George’s younger sister.
He had told me once, years ago, that his sister had died before we met. He had said it in that same careful neutral tone he used for taxes and weather and any emotion he wanted to move quickly past. I had assumed illness. Or an accident. Or something family and sad but ordinary.
The journal said otherwise.