Why would my former father-in-law have placed a private letter for me inside a bank box?
“What does the envelope say?”
I heard paper moving.
Then Maris read the handwritten message.
“To be given to Tessa only if the family forgets why she was brought into it.”
My stomach tightened.
Brought into the family?
I had always believed Harrison introduced me to Camden by coincidence at a charity dinner.
That was where our relationship began.
Or so I thought.
Then I remembered something from that first evening.
Before Camden joined us, Harrison had asked about my father.
My father, Nathan Norwood, had worked as an accountant before leaving corporate finance.
Harrison had looked at me strangely when I mentioned his name.
“Nathan Norwood was your father?”
At the time, I assumed he had heard the name somewhere.
I never asked.
Now I wished I had.
I asked Maris whether anything else was inside the box.
She became silent.
Finally, she answered.
“There’s a photograph.”
“Of Harrison?”
“Yes.”
Another pause.
“And your father is standing beside him.”
I sat alone in the same dining room where Camden had destroyed my laptop days earlier.
Suddenly, that broken computer seemed almost meaningless.
The real story had begun years before my marriage.
Years before I met Camden.
Perhaps even before either of us understood that our families were connected.
I had entered the courthouse believing divorce was the end of my story with the Rourkes.
