Hazel's POV
“Your father ruined my mother’s life long before Gerald ever went to prison,” Richard said quietly, staring into his glass instead of at either of us, “and I let it happen because staying silent was easier.”
We had gathered Richard into the study the next morning, hoping his decades inside the company might reveal something about why Vivian’s hatred ran so much deeper than her father’s prison sentence alone.
“What are you talking about,” Julian asked slowly, setting down his coffee, his eyes narrowing with the particular caution he reserved for family secrets he had not yet braced himself for.
Richard finally looked up, and the guilt on his face was old and heavy, the kind that had clearly been carried for far longer than the last twelve years of Gerald’s slow revenge plot.
