Mabel said carefully, “that Naomi went to her grave believing her sister had, and was never able to prove it.

That is all I can tell you for certain.

But I think it is enough to change how you see everything that has just happened.”

Chapter 10 — The Whole Puzzle

And it did.

It changed everything, because once I understood the past, the present clicked into a single terrible shape.

Before she died, Naomi had taken legal care to leave the entire estate directly to Vivienne — twenty acres of thriving apple trees, the old homestead, and the water mill, on land whose value had climbed steeply in recent years.

But there had been a condition of circumstance built into how it all worked: for as long as Vivienne remained unmarried and dependent on her aunt, it was Delilah who managed the whole of that valuable estate, who held the practical control of all of it.