Chapter 3 The Daughter Who Came Home

I was still searching for one clever word when the guard beat me to it.

“Mr. Whitaker!” He snapped upright as though someone had yanked a string in his spine, then swung around to face me with the stunned look of a man who has just stepped on a rake. “Miss, I’m so sorry. I had no idea you were acquainted with Mr. Whitaker. Please, forgive me. Come in, come in.”

The gates were already sliding open. Two minutes earlier I had been a stranger begging not to be thrown off the property. Now the same man was practically bowing, and all it had taken was a handsome driver calling me Mrs. Stanton through a car window.

I would have been offended if it weren’t so useful.

Behind me, someone gasped. The taxi driver had finally looked past his unpaid fare and into the sports car, and every trace of grumpiness slid off his face.

“No way.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “You’re Ronan Whitaker.”

“So I’ve been told.” Ronan’s grin widened, easy and well practiced.

“I have your poster in my garage! I watched you win in the rain last season and nearly cried. My wife thought I was having a stroke.” The driver wrung his cap between both hands, then remembered I existed, and the glow dimmed into guilt. “Oh. Ma’am. The fare. About that…”

I stared down at my slippers. “I don’t have a cent on me. I’m so sorry.”

“Forget it!” He flapped a hand as though I’d offered him cold tea. “Forget the money. Ronan Whitaker, in the flesh! Would you sign my cap?”

Ronan took the cap and the pen with the lazy grace of a man who had done this ten thousand times and still enjoyed it. The driver floated back to his taxi like a lottery winner.

That left the two of us, and a long moment in which Ronan studied my slippers with open delight.

“I won’t ask,” he murmured at last. “I have a feeling the story is better than anything I could guess.”

“It really isn’t.” I folded my arms over the diary hidden at my waist.

“Liar.” The window began to slide up, then paused halfway. His eyes glinted. “Try not to start a war with the Valcourts before I’ve had dinner, Mrs. Stanton.”

The sports car purred through the gates and was gone. The guard, still apologizing under his breath, offered to take me up the drive in an electric cart. I accepted without a fight. My feet hurt, and my pride had taken enough damage for one night.

The house at the end of the drive looked like a hotel that had never needed a guest. Pale stone, rows of glowing windows, a fountain big enough to hold a small navy. I climbed out of the cart on legs that didn’t feel like mine, and the front doors opened before I could knock.

Inside, the hallway was long and hushed and lined with family portraits. A grandfather with a stern mustache glared down at me. An aunt in a pearl choker looked past me. A boy on a pony smiled at nobody. Halfway along the wall hung a rectangle of wallpaper one shade paler than everything around it, as though a frame had hung there for years and then been taken away.

I didn’t let myself stop. I followed the crackle of a fire into the living room, and the first thing I saw was a man standing beside the fireplace with a glass of whiskey halfway to his mouth.

He never finished the movement.

He was tall and silver at the temples, with a face that looked carved from the same pale stone as his house. I had never met him, yet I knew exactly who he was. Mr. Valcourt, the father Juliet had walked away from. He stared at me as if the floor had split open under his feet.

The silence stretched. I kept my hands at my sides and tried to look like a woman who wasn’t about to be thrown back out into the night.

Then a small voice cut through it.

“Daddy?”

A little boy sat cross-legged on the carpet by the sofa, a toy race car clutched in one fist. Seven, maybe. Dark eyes, round cheeks, pajamas printed with tiny rockets. He tilted his head and studied me with the frank, solemn curiosity only children have.

“Why does the strange lady look like Mommy in the photograph?”

The question landed in my chest like a stone dropped down a well. I couldn’t have told you what it meant. I didn’t know which photograph, or whose mommy, or why a child raised in this house would look at me as though I were a ghost. I only saw Mr. Valcourt flinch, and felt the question hurt far more than I’d expected.

A brother. This woman had a little brother who didn’t know her.

“Go upstairs, please.” Mr. Valcourt’s voice was low and tight. He didn’t take his eyes off me. The boy scrambled to his feet and obeyed, but he glanced back twice on his way out, his small face puzzled and wary.

When the door clicked shut, Mr. Valcourt’s expression shut with it.

“You have some nerve.”

He set the glass on the mantel with such careful force that I flinched. His voice stayed quiet, which was somehow worse than shouting. “Five years. Not a letter. Not one phone call. You stood in this room and told me you would rather be loved than be a Valcourt.” His jaw worked. “So tell me, Juliet. Were you?”

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I had no history to answer with. I didn’t know what she had said to him in this room, what he had said back, which door had slammed or how loudly. All I had was a diary and a pair of ruined slippers.

But I did know I needed a bed, a roof, and someone standing between me and Jeffery’s family. And Ronan’s link to this household, whatever it was, looked like the closest thing to a lifeline I would find tonight.

So I did what any sensible adult would do when facing an angry man in a house where she wasn’t sure she was welcome.

I dropped to my knees on his marble floor.

It hurt more than I expected. Marble is not a forgiving surface. I kept my back straight and my chin tilted, because I had a feeling this family respected spine, and I tried to look sorry instead of terrified.

“I was wrong.” The words scraped my throat on the way out. I wet my lips and tried the next one the way you try on a stranger’s coat. “I made the wrong decision… Father.” It came out stiff and half a beat late, like a line read off a card. In my head he was still Mr. Valcourt, a stranger who happened to own the room, and I winced inside.

He didn’t move.

“Marrying Jeffery was a mistake. The biggest of my life.” That part, at least, wasn’t acting. I swallowed. “I’ve left him. We’re divorcing. The papers are being drawn up tonight.”

Somewhere in the walls, a clock ticked. Mr. Valcourt stared at me, and for the first time something other than anger crossed his face. First shock. Then something older, sharper and far more tired.

“You left him.” He repeated it as if tasting something sour. “You gave up this family. This name. Everything we offered you. All for that man, and now you’ve left him.” A short, humorless laugh escaped him. “If you had gone through with the engagement to Ronan, none of this would have happened.”

The floor tipped.

Engagement. To Ronan.

I stayed on my knees because I honestly wasn’t sure I could stand. The grinning man in the sports car, the one who had just teased me about my slippers, had once been meant to marry this body? The diary hadn’t said a word about it. Neither had the novel.

Mr. Valcourt caught the look on my face, and his jaw tightened as though he regretted every word. “Don’t look at me like that.” He jerked his chin toward the door. “Get up. You’re embarrassing us both.”

I got up. My knees screamed. He didn’t offer a hand.

He was still furious. I could feel it radiating off him like heat from a stove. But he picked up his glass again, and he didn’t order me out of the house, and he didn’t say the word I had been dreading.

Instead he turned toward a woman hovering in the doorway, who had plainly heard every word. “Make up the guest room.”

Guest room. Not hers. Noted.

[Warning: Mission One time remaining: 20:58:41.]

The blue words slid into view so suddenly I nearly jumped. I kept my face perfectly still.

[Target schedule detected. Ronan Whitaker. Qualifying session, tomorrow, 2:00 p.m.]

So I had somewhere to be tomorrow. All I needed was a legitimate reason to be there.

The door swung open again, and Ronan strolled in with his phone tucked into his pocket, looking like a man who had stepped out for a quick call and had no idea the room had caught fire. His gaze traveled from Mr. Valcourt’s thunderous face to my rumpled self, and one eyebrow rose.

“Family reunion?”

I stared at him, and for a moment I forgot to breathe.

He looked so ordinary standing there, one hand in his pocket, waiting for someone to laugh at his joke. He had no idea what I had just heard in this room. And I had no idea whether he already knew the other half of it.

Because if Mr. Valcourt was telling the truth, then the man in the doorway had once been meant to be Juliet’s husband.

And I had no idea what he thought of the woman who hadn’t gone through with it.