Grace arrived at the estate three days after Marcus's exile, refusing to wait in the entrance hall the way protocol now required of her, pushing past a startled Freda with the same determined force I remembered from the woman who'd once accused me of theft in this same house. Her usual composure had cracked entirely by the time she reached us, her hair slightly disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed in a way that told me she'd been crying long before she ever arrived.
"You've taken everything from him," she said, finding Nathaniel and me in the garden wing, her voice raw and unguarded in a way I'd never heard from her, even during the worst of her earlier sabotage. "First the accident, now this. He made a mistake, Nathaniel. One mistake, trying to help a girl he used to care about, and you've st
