Every day she said nothing was another day the lie sank deeper, another day the little boy was told a father he’d never met didn’t exist, another day Rosalind was walked one step closer to a signature that would rob her own true grandchildren — my girls — of what should have been theirs.

Hattie thought about my daughters a great deal in those weeks, she told me.

She’d watched them grow up in that house on holidays.

She knew they were being written out of a story by a woman who’d never earned a line in it.

That was part of what she was holding, alongside the card, and it did not get lighter.\n\nBut she also knew that a single housekeeper’s word against a beloved houseguest was nothing.

Worse than nothing — it was a resignation letter.