The letter arrived through no relay, no untraceable number — just an ordinary envelope, hand-delivered to the estate’s front gate by a courier service with no memory of who’d paid for the job, addressed simply to June Vane in careful, elegant handwriting that made my skin crawl the moment Garrick brought it inside.
“She’s not threatening you,” he said slowly, having read it first with Ronan’s permission before allowing June anywhere near it. “She’s trying something else entirely.”
June read it standing in the parlor, her face carefully blank in a way I recognized now as her own version of the composure Odile had shown at the gate weeks earlier — a woman determined not to let strangers see exactly how deep a wound had landed.
Dear June, it began, in the same elegant hand. I understand yo
