The Billionaire's Eighth Widow

Chapter 2

The diary sat closed in Ivy's lap for a long moment before she could make herself open it again.

That was the thing nobody told you about grief - that it wasn't a single door you walked through once and left behind, but a house with an infinite number of rooms, and every so often you opened one you hadn't known was there, and it was full of your sister's handwriting, and you had to decide whether to go in.

She went in.

She turned back past the final entry, past the footsteps in the east hall and the hairs left across drawer edges like tripwires, back to where the handwriting was steadier, less hurried, the loops of Rosalind's g's and y's still generous the way they'd always been since they were girls sharing a bedroom and a single desk lamp. Ivy had learned her own handwriting by copying her older sister's, badly, for years. She'd know this script blind.

March 14th, the entry read.

L. took me through the east wing today - the part of the house I haven't been shown yet, which after four months of living here feels less like an oversight and more like a decision. He called it "just storage." Storage doesn't usually have a lock that needs two keys, one of which he didn't have on him.

I asked him what was down there and he laughed the way he does when he wants a question to stop being asked - not unkindly, exactly, but final, like a door closing on a spring hinge. He said, "History. Most of it boring." And then he changed the subject to something about the spring gala, and I let him, because I am starting to understand that in this house, some silences are the loudest thing anyone says to you.

Ivy read it twice, feeling the shape of something cold settle behind her sternum. Rosalind had never been a woman who let a closed door stay closed. Growing up, she'd been the one who read the last page of a book first if she couldn't stand the suspense, who went through their parents' mail after the accident because someone had to, who'd once climbed onto the garage roof at fifteen because she refused to believe their father when he said the noise up there was "just raccoons." She let things go when letting them go cost her nothing. She never let them go when they mattered.

The next entry was dated ten days later.

Agnes brought tea to the east sitting room this morning without me asking, which she never does unless she's trying to be near me for a reason. She stayed longer than she needed to, refilling a cup that was already full, and when I finally asked her outright if something was wrong in this house, she looked at the door before she looked at me. That's when I knew the answer was yes, even though what she actually said was "No, ma'am. Nothing at all." Her hands were shaking when she said it. I don't think it was age.

I've started noticing which staff will meet my eyes and which won't. It's not all of them. Just certain ones, and always in relation to certain rooms. I used to think I was imagining a pattern because I was lonely and bored and looking for one. I don't think that anymore.

Ivy set the diary down against her knee and pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes.

Agnes. A name, finally - a real person inside that house, someone who existed beyond the tabloid photographs of a marble staircase and a chandelier that cost more than Ivy's entire life. Someone whose hands had shaken. Someone who knew something and had decided, at least for a while, that the safest thing to do with what she knew was carry it in silence, the way people in dangerous places learn to.

She kept reading. The entries grew shorter as the months went on, not because Rosalind had less to say but because - Ivy could feel it in the compression of the sentences, the way the handwriting tightened toward the margins like something trying to take up less space - because Rosalind had started to believe the diary itself wasn't private anymore either.

April 30th. L. asked me tonight, out of nowhere, whether I'd ever consider "getting away for a while." Not a vacation. The way he said it, it sounded like an evacuation. I asked him what he meant and he wouldn't look at me directly when he answered, which frightened me more than anything he actually said. I love him. I think I do. But loving someone and trusting the walls around him are two very different rooms to stand in, and lately I only feel safe in one of them.

May 6th. Someone has been in this room. Nothing missing. Things moved a centimeter, like I said before - but tonight it was my jewelry box, and the hair I'd left across the drawer was gone, not broken, gone, which means whoever it was knew to look for it, which means whoever it was has done this before, to someone else, and knew exactly what to check for.

I keep thinking about the others. The six women who had this room before me. I never let myself think about them as anything but a rumor the papers liked. I think about them differently now.

Ivy's hands had gone unsteady enough that the page trembled slightly under her fingers. She thought about the six wives too, now - had thought about them for months, actually, ever since the numbness had worn thin enough to let anger in behind it. But there was a difference between reading a printed obituary from a database at two in the morning and reading her own sister's handwriting admit, in real time, that she'd started to count herself among them before she'd even died.

The last entry - the one she'd already read once tonight, four days before the end - sat only a few pages further on. Ivy read it again anyway.

I keep hearing footsteps in the east hall at night...

I haven't told L. I don't know why. Maybe because if I say it out loud to him, it becomes real, and I am so tired of things being real in this house.

If anything happens to me, look at the letters. Not the ones they'll show you. The ones I hid.

Ivy stared at that last line until the words blurred and reformed and blurred again.

The letters. Not the ones they'll show you.

Somewhere inside Ashcroft Manor, in a house Ivy had never once set foot in, her sister had hidden something on purpose, specifically because she'd anticipated needing someone to find it after she was gone. Rosalind hadn't died not knowing. She'd died preparing. And nobody - not the police, not the coroner, not the family who'd shipped back three boxes of correspondence and a wedding ring like the sum total of a life fit in a shipping manifest - had ever bothered to ask what a woman that careful might have hidden, and where.

Ivy closed the diary with both hands, the way you'd close something that might still be breathing, and that was when the memory came for her - unbidden, uninvited, arriving the way it always did, sideways, through a door she hadn't opened on purpose.

Three calls.

She was back in her old apartment before this one, seven months and a lifetime ago, sitting at her kitchen table with sheet music spread out for a student recital she'd been rearranging for the fourth time because the fingering in the third measure bothered her and she couldn't let it go. Her phone had lit up. Rosalind. She remembered looking at it. She remembered the specific, ordinary, unforgivable thought that had gone through her mind: I'll call her back after this.

She hadn't called back after that.

Two days later, the phone had lit up again. Rosalind. Ivy had been in the middle of a lesson, Mason's predecessor bowing through a scale flat enough to set her teeth on edge, and she'd silenced it without even looking at the screen, promising herself, again, later.

The third call had come at eleven at night, four days before Ivy would get a different call - a different number, a lawyer's office, a voice asking gently if she was sitting down - and by then Ivy had been so deep in her own small, manageable exhaustion, so committed to the idea that everything Rosalind ever called about could keep until tomorrow because Rosalind was always the one who held things together and never the one who needed holding, that Ivy had looked at her sister's name lighting up the screen at eleven o'clock at night and thought, not now, and gone to sleep.

She had never spoken to her sister again.

She didn't know, would never know, whether those three calls had been about the footsteps in the east hall, or the moved jewelry box, or Agnes's shaking hands, or something worse that hadn't made it into the diary at all. She would never know what her sister had needed to say badly enough to call three times in a single week, after months of a marriage during which Rosalind - proud, capable, always the one who covered for everyone else - had almost certainly never called Ivy that many times in that short a window before.

Ivy sat on the floor of her apartment with her dead sister's diary in her lap and let herself, for the first time in seven months, actually feel the specific, surgical shape of that failure instead of stepping around it.

She didn't cry, exactly. Crying had stopped coming easily to her sometime around month three, replaced by something drier and harder to name - a kind of internal bracing, like a held breath that never quite got to exhale. But her shoulders curled forward over the diary, and her jaw ached from how hard she was holding it, and for several long minutes the only sound in the apartment was the dry cleaner's sign buzzing faintly through the floor and her own breathing, ragged, slow, deliberate, the way she used to breathe before walking onstage.

I was too busy.

I was three phone calls too busy to save my sister's life.

She let the thought sit there, ugly and complete, instead of flinching away from it the way she had every other time it had surfaced over the last seven months. She let it settle into her chest and take up its full weight.

And then, slowly, something underneath the guilt began to hold its shape and harden.

Guilt was useless. Guilt didn't call anyone back. Guilt didn't find hidden letters or explain shaking hands or answer why a man had asked his wife, out of nowhere, whether she'd ever consider getting away - a question that sounded like an evacuation and not an invitation. Guilt just sat there, circling the same three unanswered calls forever, unless she gave it somewhere to go.

She could give it somewhere to go.

Ivy wiped her face with the back of her wrist - a single pass, efficient, done - and looked down at the diary and the folded note beside it on the floor, the six words that had started all of this lying there in that same careful, deliberate hand. You're next if you marry him.

Whoever had written that note knew something Ivy didn't yet. But Rosalind had known something too, and Rosalind had left a trail on purpose, specifically for someone patient enough and stubborn enough and guilty enough to follow it all the way into a house that had swallowed seven women whole and called every single one of them an accident.

Ivy had spent seven months telling herself she was building a file nobody would ever ask her to finish. Tonight, sitting on the floor with her sister's unfinished sentence in her lap, she understood that she wasn't building a file anymore. She was building a case. And a case, unlike grief, had an ending - one she intended to reach, whatever it cost her, because the alternative was living the rest of her life as the sister who let three phone calls go to voicemail and called it being busy.

She got up off the floor. Her knees had gone stiff from sitting so long, and she ignored it, crossing the small apartment to the desk wedged between her bed and the window, where her laptop sat closed under a week's worth of unopened mail she still hadn't found the nerve to sort through.

She pushed the mail aside. She opened the laptop. The screen woke slowly, throwing pale light across the room, across the diary still open on the floor behind her, across the note with its six patient, deliberate words.

Ivy's fingers hovered over the keyboard for exactly as long as it took her to stop asking herself whether this was a good idea.

Then she typed the only name that mattered.

Lucien Ashcroft.

Her thumb hovered over the return key. Somewhere behind her, in the dark, her sister's diary sat open to a page that ended mid-sentence - the way Rosalind's life had ended mid-sentence, the way this investigation, Ivy understood with sudden, total clarity, would not be allowed to.

She pressed enter.