Ronald adjusted his glasses again, his expression hardening as he drew a second, older file from his briefcase.
“The report from the insurance investigators regarding the cabin fire six years ago,” Ronald said.
“The one where you saved Russell.”
He laid the document on the table, the title page marked with a red stamp.
“The fire marshal’s office was paid fifty thousand dollars to close that file as an accidental electrical failure,” Ronald said.
“But the private investigator Gwendolyn hired back then kept his own notes.”
I stared at the paper, the letters swimming before my eyes.
“Why would Gwendolyn hire a private investigator for a fire she claimed she saved him from?” I asked.
Grant stepped closer, his voice gravelly and low.
“Because she wanted to make sure nobody looked at the gas line in the basement.”
The room went entirely silent, the implication hanging in the cold air between us.
The clean scent of sterile bandages replaced the odor of expensive cedar.
My brother Arthur tapped his fingers rhythmically on the edge of his open laptop, the sound dry and fast against the mahogany conference table.
The overhead lights in the Nashville room were dimmed, casting long shadows across the legal pads and glass pitchers of water.
The room smelled of fresh paint and the faint, sweet scent of cold tea that had gone untouched for hours.
Arthur kept his eyes on the screen, his thumb hovering over the trackpad as he waited for me to sit down opposite him.
“This is from the venue dressing room corridor camera,” Arthur said, his voice flat and unhurried.
“The feed was deleted from the main security server three minutes after it was recorded, but the backup drive in the basement didn’t miss a single second.”
He pressed the spacebar on his keyboard, and the black-and-white security footage flickered to life.
On the screen, Gwendolyn stood alone in the narrow hallway outside the dressing room, holding the cream-colored gown over her left arm.
The hallway was empty, the pattern of the expensive wallpaper repeating in endless gray diamonds behind her.
She looked around twice, her gaze lingering on the empty corners of the ceiling where the dark lenses of the cameras were mounted.
Once she was satisfied she was alone, she pulled a small pair of silver sewing scissors from her evening clutch.
With two swift, deliberate jerks of her wrists, she shredded the delicate silk layers near the left shoulder of the gown, pulling the fabric until it hung in long, jagged strips.
I touched my collarbone, my finger pressing against the bare skin where my mother’s silver Saint Christopher pendant used to hang before Gwendolyn claimed it as her own.
On the screen, Gwendolyn set the scissors on a decorative mahogany side table and pinched the flesh of her own forearm.
She twisted it hard, holding it for five long seconds, her mouth opening in a silent gasp of pain.
“She didn’t even hesitate,” Grant said, his gravelly voice tight as he adjusted his gold cufflinks.
The video continued to loop, showing Gwendolyn smoothing her hair down, adjusting her expression into a sob, and turning the door handle to walk back inside.
My six years of submissive silence, of believing I was the one who needed to prove her worth to Russell, felt like a heavy weight pressing down on my chest.
“Arthur, pause it there,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
The frame froze on Gwendolyn’s face, her eyes wide, her lips parted in a manufactured expression of terror.
“How long have you had this?” I asked.
Arthur didn’t look up from his keyboard.
“About forty-eight hours,” he replied.
Ronald took off his wire-rimmed glasses, polished them with a small microfiber cloth, and slid them back onto his nose.
He opened a thick blue folder, sliding three sheets of paper toward me across the polished wood of the table.
“Gwendolyn Fairchild is not the wealthy heiress Russell thinks she is,” Ronald said, pointing to a column of figures at the bottom of the second page.
“These are offshore ledger summaries from Nassau.”
The numbers were listed in neat rows, each one preceded by a negative sign and dated within the last three years.
“She owes two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to the Atlantis casino group alone,” Ronald said.
I looked at the dates of the transactions, which went back to the autumn before last.
“Russell has no idea,” I said.
“None,” Ronald replied, tapping the paper with the end of his pen.
“He believes her family’s shipping fortune is backing his public offering next month.”
The documents showed five separate wire transfers from a joint business account in Lake Forest to a private bank in the Bahamas, all processed under Gwendolyn’s maiden name.
“The bank accounts in Nassau are held under a shell company called Blue Horizon Holdings,” Ronald said, turning a page.
“She has been using Russell’s corporate funds to cover the interest payments on her credit lines since last winter.”
