She had never imagined she would meet the woman in the pictures, and certainly not like this: not banished, not weeping in a locked study on the night her son promised himself to the person who had done the banishing.
The estranged mother of the man who owned the building was the last person Adrienne expected to find behind that oak door.
And yet here she was, and here they all were, and the careful distance Adrienne had kept from these people’s lives for a year had just collapsed to nothing in the space of three small knocks.
Marguerite looked down at the small girl in the red dress, then up at the frightened woman behind her, and she clutched a thick yellow envelope to her chest like something she’d carry into a fire.
“I can’t do this by myself,” she said, and her voice broke on it.
“My son is about to marry a terrible lie.”
Adrienne’s every instinct said to step back.
This was not her house, not her family, not her disaster to walk into.
But Taylor had already crossed the threshold, and was already looking up at the old woman with the pure, uncomplicated tenderness that only very small children can give a stranger.
“If she’s crying,” Taylor said, with the certainty of settled law, “she needs to talk to him.”
Chapter 5 — The Estrangement
Marguerite lowered herself into the chair by the desk, and the story came out of her in pieces, the way a wound reopens.
For most of a year she had watched a stranger take her son apart and rebuild him into someone she didn’t recognize.
It had been gradual, and it had been expert.