THE DEVIL I LOVE

Chapter Seventeen — Lydia Makes a Move

Lydia Sinclair had made a decision.

She had not announced it to anyone, because Lydia had learned early that announced decisions invited interference, and she had no interest in interference. She had simply, quietly, decided to find out what her father was hiding.

She had her reasons.

She had watched Aria grow up carrying the weight of the Sinclair name with a grace that occasionally looked like happiness from a distance and rarely was. She had watched her sister come alive in the past six weeks in a way that was unmistakable to anyone paying attention. And she had sat across from Aria at a dinner table and heard her say he makes me feel like myself in the voice of someone saying something true for the first time.

Lydia was twenty years old. She was not willing to watch that get destroyed by something no one would explain.

So she went to see her grandmother.

Eleanor Sinclair was seventy-eight years old, lived in the original family home two hours outside the city, and had the particular freedom of a woman who had outlived most of the people whose opinions had ever constrained her. She had watched her son build his empire with pride and occasional private reservations that she had always been too tactful to voice at the wrong moment.

Lydia had always suspected Eleanor was waiting for the right moment.

She arrived on a Saturday morning with flowers and no particular pretense.

Eleanor received her in the sitting room with the warm directness of someone who had no time left for the indirect version of anything.

"You look like your mother," Eleanor said, "but you think like me. Sit down."

Lydia sat.

"You want to know about Marcus Voss," Eleanor said, before Lydia had opened her mouth.

Lydia blinked. "How did you—"

"Because something has stirred that water again and you have your gathering-information face on." Eleanor settled back in her chair. "Your father won't tell you. He's spent twenty years perfecting the not-telling."

"Will you?"

Eleanor looked at her granddaughter for a moment with eyes that had watched a great deal of history pass.

"What I know," she said carefully, "is that your father and Marcus Voss built something real together. And that when it succeeded, your father made a decision that benefitted this family very greatly and cost Marcus Voss nearly everything."

"Was it wrong?" Lydia asked. "What Dad did?"

Eleanor was quiet for a moment.

"It was legal," she said finally. "Whether it was right is a question your father has never fully answered to himself, I think." She paused. "Marcus Voss was not an innocent man either — he had his own maneuvers, his own ambitions. But what your father did was more damaging. And Richard has spent twenty years building walls around it because guilt and pride are an uncomfortable combination."

Lydia sat very still.

"The Voss boy," Eleanor said, watching her. "The son. He's involved somehow."

"Aria," Lydia said simply.

Eleanor absorbed this. Something in her expression shifted — not disapproval. Something more complex.

"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, that is complicated."

"Yes."

"And Aria knows—"

"Most of it. Not all."

Eleanor was quiet for a long time. Outside her sitting room window, the old garden moved gently in the morning breeze.

"The truth would hurt your father," Eleanor said finally. "But carrying the lie is hurting everyone else." She looked at Lydia directly. "I'll tell you what I know. All of it. And what you do with it is yours to decide."

Lydia leaned forward.

"Tell me," she said.