The engagement was a trap.

The woman was a murderer.

The comfortable story was a lie built over a grave.

The peace was the peace of a man who had buried his brother without knowing the coffin was empty and married himself to the person responsible for the emptiness.

The mirror did not shatter Daniel’s good fortune.

It shattered the elaborate, beautiful counterfeit that had been standing where his good fortune should have been, and it was only in the shattering, only by having the false thing broken loudly against the marble at midnight, that the real thing underneath it — a living brother, a nephew, a woman of extraordinary courage who had been in his house all along — could finally come to light.

Some things have to break before you can see what they were hiding.

That was the lesson of the mirror, and of the whole night that followed it, though it would take Daniel a year and a garden mosaic to understand it fully.

Chapter 2 — Among the Broken Glass

At the far end of the east hallway, beneath the unsteady glow of a chandelier, Daniel saw the shattered remains of his grandmother’s antique mirror scattered across the marble.

And a woman lay unconscious among the broken glass.

It was Maria Collins, the housekeeper, still in her blue uniform, and there was blood on the fabric.

A wound marked her forehead.

Cuts covered both of her arms.