And he did not let me walk out of ten years of this only to let me walk off this estate tonight.”

Caspian rose.

“Then tell me what it opens.”

“Everything,” she said.

“Everything he spent a decade making sure no one would ever believe I could describe.” She turned the key over in her fingers, and for the first time he saw not the frightened woman the maid had described but something underneath it — someone who had been waiting, with terrible patience, for exactly this night.

“It opens the one box that turns his word against mine into evidence against him.