THE BLACKSTONE'S RECKONING

Chapter Four: The Question He Almost Answered

Wendy found him in the garden the next morning, of all places, standing near the hedge maze Patricia Blackstone had commissioned purely so guests would have something to compliment her about.

"You're up early, Mr. Lee."

"Alexander." He didn't turn around right away. "And I could say the same. Don't the household staff usually start their day inside?"

"I'm not most of the household staff." She crossed her arms, stopping a few feet away, close enough to see the tension sitting in his shoulders like something he'd been carrying since the moment he'd arrived. "You look like a man who didn't sleep."

"I don't sleep much in this house."

"Guilty conscience?"

That got his attention. He turned, and there it was again, that same unreadable weight in his eyes from the foyer, except now it had cracked open just slightly at the edges, enough that she could see something moving underneath.

"Something like that," he said quietly.

"Then tell me." Wendy stepped closer, voice low, urgent in a way she hadn't planned for it to be. "You know something about me. You knew my name before anyone said it. You looked at me in that window like you already had a file on my whole life. And last night Richard asked you to watch me, and you didn't say no."

"I didn't say yes either."

"That's not the same as telling him no."

Alexander was quiet for a long moment, long enough that Wendy thought he might actually walk away from it, the same careful retreat he'd managed every time this conversation got close to something real.

"My father knew your father," he said instead.

The garden went very still.

"What?"

"Mark Blackstone." Alexander said the name like it cost him something. "Before you were born, actually, and after. They were friends, in the way men in very different worlds sometimes end up friends. Business first, then something more than business."

Wendy's mouth had gone dry. "I don't have a father."

"You did." Alexander's voice gentled, careful now, like he was handling something that might shatter. "You do. Or you did. I'm sorry, I don't know the right tense for this."

"Stop." Wendy's hand came up, not quite steady. "I don't know what you're talking about. My father isn't part of any story I know. Nobody's ever mentioned a father, not Richard, not Patricia, not my own mother—"

"Because your mother doesn't remember him either." The words came out fast now, like he'd finally decided to stop rationing them. "Wendy, your mother's memory loss, it isn't just some accident of trauma the doctors can't explain. There's a reason nobody in this house has ever once offered you the missing pieces of your own life. There's a reason they've kept her close for five years instead of just letting her go."

Wendy's pulse was roaring in her ears now, loud enough to drown out the birds, the wind through the hedges, everything except his voice.

"What reason," she breathed.

Alexander opened his mouth.

"Alexander." Richard's voice cracked across the garden like a whip, cheerful on the surface and murderous underneath, the way it always was when he wanted something to look like nothing. "There you are. I was hoping to catch you before breakfast, there's a call I need your opinion on."

Something shut behind Alexander's eyes, fast and total, a door slamming on instinct. "Of course."

"Wendy." Richard's gaze slid to her, and for one unbearable second she was certain, absolutely certain, that he'd heard every word. "Don't you have linens to see to?"

"Yes, sir." The words came out smooth. Five years of practice, and underneath it, her whole body screaming.

Alexander gave her one last look as Richard steered him away, an apology and a promise both, though for what exactly, she still didn't have the shape of.

She didn't move for a full minute after they disappeared inside.

Mark Blackstone. Her father, apparently. A name that had never once been spoken in this house in five years, not by Richard, not by Patricia, not by the staff who'd surely known the family before whatever had happened, happened. A name kept out of every conversation as carefully and deliberately as if someone had gone around the house collecting it, the way you'd collect a weapon out of a child's reach.

There's a reason they've kept her close for five years instead of just letting her go.

Wendy's hands had started shaking again, and this time it had nothing to do with smoke.

She found Sofia in the laundry room an hour later and told her everything in a whisper, fast and disjointed, watching her best friend's face go from confused to horrified in real time.

"A father," Sofia said slowly. "You have a father. Had. Whatever the tense is."

"That's what he said."

"And Richard's known this whole time. Richard's sat across from you at breakfast for five years, calling your mother by her first name like she's furniture, and he's known this whole time that you had a whole life before this house that nobody bothered to mention."

"That's what it sounds like."

Sofia's jaw tightened, the joke finally, completely gone from her face. "Wendy. What if it's worse than just knowing. What if Richard's the reason there's nothing left to know."

The thought landed like a stone in Wendy's stomach, one she hadn't let herself think in those exact words before, though something in her chest had clearly been circling it for longer than she wanted to admit.

That night, she waited until the house had gone fully dark, until Elizabeth's breathing had settled into the slow rhythm of real sleep, and slipped down the back stairwell toward the study, the one room in the house Richard kept locked whenever he wasn't in it personally.

The lock gave way easily enough, five years of watching, five years of learning which staff carried which keys, finally worth something.

The desk drawers held nothing but contracts and correspondence, dense and boring and entirely legitimate on their surface. She almost gave up. She almost walked back out the way she'd come, quiet as smoke, and told herself tomorrow she'd try again.

Then her fingers found the false bottom.

A single folder, thin, unlabeled, tucked beneath a stack of shipping manifests like an afterthought. Wendy's hands were not steady at all now as she opened it, as the study's dim lamp caught the edge of a photograph clipped to the top page.

A man, dark-haired, smiling, an arm around a woman who looked exactly, unmistakably, impossibly like her mother, twenty years younger and entirely unbroken. And beside them, small and grinning gap-toothed at the camera, a little girl who could only have been her.

Underneath the photograph, in Richard's own handwriting, a single line that turned Wendy's blood to ice water.

*Mark's daughter looks more like him every year. She'll need watching once she's older, in case she remembers what she saw that night.*

The study door creaked open behind her.

Wendy spun, folder clutched against her chest, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth, and found herself staring straight into Richard Blackstone's eyes, cold and amused and utterly, terrifyingly calm, as if he'd been expecting to find her there all along.

"Well," he said softly, stepping inside and closing the door behind him with a quiet, final click. "It looks like we finally have something to talk about, Wendy."