The room was small, immaculate, and heartbreakingly familiar. The same neat arrangement of pencils. The same stacks of labeled file folders. The same insistence on order that he had in our apartment, only here the order seemed to hum with urgency. Like every system in the room had been built not for comfort but for protection.
Helena went straight to the desk, opened the bottom drawer, pressed something at the back, and lifted out a false panel.
Inside lay a leather-bound journal, several photographs, and a stack of clipped papers.
“You should read,” she said.
My hands shook as I opened the journal. George’s handwriting filled the page—small, slanted, exact. Familiar enough that my throat closed at once.
The first entry I landed on wasn’t about Helena or Clare or any woman currently living on the property.
It was about Patricia.
George’s younger sister.
He had told me once, years ago, that his sister had died before we met. He had said it in that same careful neutral tone he used for taxes and weather and any emotion he wanted to move quickly past. I had assumed illness. Or an accident. Or something family and sad but ordinary.
The journal said otherwise.