Harriet stood alone in her office before dawn, staring at the single sentence recovered from beneath the family tree:
“This tree was painted after the fire.”
She studied every timeline they had created over the past several weeks. Not one contained any reference to a fire. No newspapers. No church records. No insurance claims. No estate repairs. Nothing. A fire large enough to reshape an entire family should have left hundreds of traces. Instead, it had disappeared completely.
Harriet realized this could not have happened naturally. Someone hadn’t erased the fire after it occurred. They had planned its disappearance from the very beginning. For the first time, she believed the Ashford mystery may not have started with a hidden child. It may have started with a single night that history
