He Offered $400,000—She Asked for Her Mother

Chapter Two: The Favor He Couldn't Explain

Nora agreed to talk in the cafe across the street. She chose a table beside the exit. Julian ordered nothing for her until she asked for tea and toast.

“Start with the marriage,” she said.

He stared at the closed ring box on the table.

His grandmother, Beatrice, had been asking to meet the fiancee he had invented six months earlier. What began as an excuse to escape family matchmaking had become a story he could no longer manage. That morning, his grandmother had refused to attend her birthday dinner unless he brought the woman he claimed to love.

“A year?” Nora asked.

“I thought if the marriage looked settled, they'd finally leave me alone.”

“You thought a woman with nowhere to sleep would be easy to buy.”

He did not defend himself.

“Yes. I dressed it up as an arrangement. It was still that.”

Nora slid the photograph closer to him.

“Now tell me about her.”

Evelyn had been Beatrice's companion for four years. She read to her, accompanied her on walks, and kept the household running when illness made Beatrice impatient with everyone else. Julian remembered her kindness, but he also remembered the day his uncle Victor told him she had stolen a bracelet and disappeared.

“When?”

“Six weeks ago.”

Nora set down her cup.

“That's when her calls stopped.”

She had been working in another town, living in a room above the laundry where she sorted linens. When her mother vanished, she took leave, then lost her job after staying away too long. The rent followed. She had filed a missing-person report and brought every scrap of information she could find to the city.

“Your uncle told me she left voluntarily,” she said. “The housekeeper wouldn't even let me through the gate.”

Julian looked at the photograph again.

“I never asked why she would leave without saying goodbye.”

“Ask now.”