My Sister Framed Me with a Stranger, So I Confessed

Chapter 3 The Envelope

I did not open the envelope on the terrace. I took it, and I put it in my clutch, and I went home.

The house on Crescent Street was dark when I arrived, which meant my father was still at the gala, cleaning up the mess I had made. Our housekeeper had left a single lamp on in the front hall. I walked up the stairs to my room without turning on any more lights, and I locked the door, and I sat on the edge of my bed with the envelope in my hands.

For ten minutes, I did not open it. I was afraid. Not of what it might say about Diana, but of what it might say about me. Andrew Park had said that Diana hired him to investigate me and found something she did not like. That could mean anything. It could mean an old debt, or a mistake I had made years ago, or something about my mother, who had died when I was nine and whose memory Cecilia had spent the last fourteen years carefully sanding down to nothing.

I opened it.

Inside were four pages. The first was a copy of a trust document, dated eleven years ago, establishing the Ashford Family Foundation, with my father and Cecilia listed as trustees and Diana listed as a beneficiary. My name was not on it. The second was a copy of my mother's will, dated a year before she died, which had established a separate trust for me, to be administered by my father, with the assets to be released to me on my twenty-fifth birthday. My twenty-fifth birthday was in three months.

The third page was a bank record. My mother's trust had been emptied four years ago. Every dollar of it had been transferred, in a series of transactions, into an account held by the Ashford Family Foundation, and then out again, into an account in Cecilia's name.

The fourth page was a photograph. It was old, grainy, taken in some European city I did not recognize. In it, a younger Cecilia stood beside a man I had never seen, and on her hip was a small child with dark hair. On the back of the photograph, in handwriting I did not recognize, was written: Diana, age two, with mother and father.

I sat there for a long time.

When I was nine years old, my mother died of a sudden illness. Six months later, my father married Cecilia, who had been his assistant. A year after that, Cecilia adopted Diana, who was then ten. Diana had always been described as Cecilia's daughter from a previous relationship, and no one had ever questioned it, because Cecilia had told the story so many times and so smoothly that it had become part of the family's official history.

But the photograph said otherwise. Diana was Cecilia's biological child, born while Cecilia was married to another man, a man who was not my father. And if that was true, then Cecilia had been lying to my father for fourteen years.

And my mother's money had paid for the lie.

I put the pages back in the envelope. My hands were steady now. I had spent ten years being told that I was the difficult one, the ungrateful one, the daughter who did not fit into the family that Cecilia had built. I had spent ten years watching Diana take what should have been mine and smile at me while she did it. I had spent ten years believing that I had no power, because power in that house was distributed by Cecilia, and Cecilia had decided that I would have none.

But the money was mine. The trust was mine. And the lie, if I could prove it, belonged to no one but them.

I heard the front door open downstairs. I heard my father's voice, and Cecilia's, and Diana's, and then the sound of footsteps on the stairs. I put the envelope under my mattress and lay down, and when the knock came at my door, I did not answer.

"Lena," my father said. "We need to talk about tonight."

I closed my eyes and said nothing.

"I know you are awake," he said. "Open the door."

I did not.

He stood there for a long time. Then he said, in a voice I had never heard him use before, something that might have been fear or might have been anger, "What did you do with the phone?"

I smiled into the dark.

"Nothing," I said. "I gave it to the foundation's security."

It was not true. But it would keep him up all night, and that was enough for now.