“That is the bracket,” Vivienne said softly.

“That is how I got free.”

Chapter 16 — The Evidence

The deputies secured the cellar and began to document it, and it did not take them long to find the rest, because Delilah, so careful for thirty years, had grown careless in her certainty of winning.

In a workbench drawer they found several crumpled sheets of notepad paper, and on them, one sentence written over and over in a practicing hand: I have chosen to leave town because I am in love with another man. It was Delilah’s handwriting, laboring to forge Vivienne’s — the letter she had failed for three days to extract from her niece, that she had finally decided to counterfeit herself.

Beside it they found the land deeds to Naomi’s estate, and a signed agreement, executed by Wayne Vance, stipulating that upon forcing a legal marriage with Vivienne, Wayne would sign over fifty percent of all future profits from the land directly to Delilah.