The Vows We Never Said

Chapter Five

Dinner ended the way most difficult dinners do too fast and not fast enough, everyone performing normalcy until the plates were cleared and it became socially acceptable to leave.

Camille reappeared just as dessert arrived, phone tucked away, expression rearranged into something bright and unbothered, as though the last twenty minutes had happened to someone else entirely. She slid back into her seat beside Theo and picked up the thread of conversation exactly where she'd dropped it, effortlessly, seamlessly, a woman who had clearly done this exact recovery before.

Theo matched her energy without hesitation. Whatever unease Nora had watched cross his face in the hallway had folded itself neatly away by the time he reached for the wine bottle to refill Camille's glass, attentive in the automatic way of someone performing a role he'd rehearsed a thousand times.

Nora ate her dessert and said almost nothing.

She caught Eleanor watching her once, briefly, across the table not with pity, not with concern exactly, but with the specific attentiveness of someone taking notes for later.

The evening broke apart the way these things did, guests peeling off toward their own corners of the house. Nora gathered her bag and made her excuses first, eager to be back in her truck, back on the coast road, back somewhere the air didn't feel quite so thick with things nobody was saying out loud.

She made it as far as the front steps before a voice stopped her.

"Walk with me to the car."

Eleanor was already moving, her cardigan traded for a proper coat now, cane in one hand, though Nora suspected she used it more for effect than necessity. Nora fell into step beside her without really deciding to.

"You heard something tonight," Eleanor said, once they'd cleared the front door and the porch lights had faded behind them into the dark of the drive. It wasn't a question.

"I don't know what I heard."

"I think you do. I think my grandson has simply trained everyone around him to doubt their own ears." Eleanor's voice carried none of the sharpness from the dinner table now, something gentler underneath it, tired in a way that had nothing to do with her age. "He does that. Always has. Rather than face something unpleasant, he'll talk himself into believing it isn't there."

Nora thought of the hallway. Of Theo's easy dismissal, the practiced calm of a man closing a door on his own discomfort.

"He did that tonight," she said. "With me."

"I imagine he did." Eleanor stopped walking, turned to face her fully, and for a moment the porch light caught her expression in a way that made her look far less frail than her cane suggested. "I've watched that boy avoid difficult truths his entire life, Nora. He learned it from his father, God rest him, who learned it from his father before that. Every Castellan man alive has believed that silence is the same thing as strength."

"That's not strength. That's just quiet."

"Yes." Something that might have been approval crossed Eleanor's face. "I've always thought so too."

They stood together in the dark for a moment, the ocean somewhere beyond the hedges doing its slow, indifferent work.

"I've been keeping a file," Eleanor said finally, matter-of-fact, like she was mentioning a recipe rather than a two-year investigation. "On Camille. On her father's business dealings. Nothing solid enough to act on yet mostly instinct, a few inconsistencies here and there, the kind of thing an old woman with too much time notices when nobody thinks she's paying attention."

Nora stared at her. "Why haven't you told Theo?"

"Because he wouldn't hear it. Not from me. I'm his grandmother; everything I say about Camille gets filed under overprotective, jealous, and unable to let go." Eleanor's mouth thinned. "He needs to hear it from someone he can't dismiss quite so easily."

"And you think that's me."

"I think," Eleanor said, "that whatever happened between you two six years ago, he never actually got over it. A man doesn't leave every garden on his property half-finished for six years because he's simply too busy to hire a landscaper." She reached out and touched Nora's arm, brief and firm. "You matter to him in a way Camille never will, whether he's ready to admit that or not. That makes you the one person in this house he might actually listen to, eventually, if you can get him to stop talking himself out of what's right in front of him."

Nora didn't have an answer for that. The wind off the water picked up, cold enough to cut through her jacket, and somewhere behind them, back in the house, she could hear faint laughter drifting from an open window Theo's laugh, easy and unbothered, exactly the sound she'd been hearing all night.

"I'll show you the file," Eleanor said. "Tomorrow. Somewhere he won't think to look for us."

"Why me? Why not go to the police, or a lawyer, or..."

"Because I don't have proof yet, dear. I have suspicion and a very long memory." Eleanor started back toward the house, cane tapping against stone. "And because you're the only person who's walked back into this family in six years who actually has a reason to look closely enough to find it."

She left Nora standing alone in the drive, staring up at the lit windows of a house full of people she no longer entirely trusted, one of whom she still, despite every reasonable objection, hadn't stopped loving.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A text from Theo, sent minutes after she'd walked out the door.

Sorry about tonight. Can we talk tomorrow? Just us.

Nora looked at the message for a long moment before slipping the phone back into her pocket without responding.

Tomorrow, she thought, was going to be a very long day.