THE HEIR'S REVENGE

chapter 134

I looked at the documents spread across my desk, the particular unwelcome complexity of them sitting heavily against everything I had believed, this entire year, about the grandfather I had barely known but had come to love fiercely anyway, through his own careful, grief-soaked words read aloud in a courtroom.

"I need to know if this is true," I said finally. "Properly. Not through Margaret Vane's archivist, and not simply dismissed because it's uncomfortable. I need our own investigation, independent, thorough, before I decide what any of this actually means."

"I will begin immediately," Henry said. "Though I want to prepare you — this kind of investigation, into decades-old property records and sealed litigation, is unlikely to move quickly. It may take weeks, possibly longer, before we have a clear enough picture to know exactly what we're dealing with."

I nodded, understanding, and sat for a long while after Henry left, alone in the study with the documents still spread across my desk, the particular unsettled weight of a question I did not want to be asking, about a man whose memory I had spent this entire year defending, honouring, and building an entire Foundation around, now suddenly, uncomfortably uncertain in a way I had never once expected it to become.

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I found myself, over the following days, watching Lily with a particular new tenderness, thinking about the story I had told her, that morning at Sarah's grave, about a grandfather who never gave up searching, about eleven years of refusing to let go, and wondering, uneasily, whether that story — the one I had built so much of this past year around — was as complete and as simple as I had allowed myself to believe.

"You're doing the thinking face again," Lily observed at breakfast one morning, watching me over her toast with the particular careful attention she brought to reading the adults around her.

"I have a lot to think about right now," I admitted.

"Is it about the bad people again," she asked, with the particular directness that so often cut straight to the heart of something I had been trying to carefully avoid articulating. "Aunt Victoria's family. Are they doing something new?"

I considered how much to tell her, weighing, as I always did, the plain honesty I had learned to give her against my own instinct to protect her from things I did not yet fully understand myself.

"It's complicated," I said finally. "It's not exactly about them being bad people. It's about something from a long time ago, before you were born, before I was born, that I'm trying to understand better."

Lily considered this with visible seriousness.

"Like history," she said. "The kind of thing you learn about but can't actually change, because it already happened."

"Something like that," I agreed.

"Is it about Grandpa Richard," she asked, and I felt something catch sharply in my chest at the plain, unguarded directness of the question, arrived at with none of the careful hedging an adult might have applied.

"Why do you ask that," I said, genuinely startled.

Lily shrugged, with the particular unselfconscious wisdom she so often brought to exactly the questions I least expected. "Because you've been looking at his picture a lot. The one in your study. And you get the thinking face every time you look at it."

I had not realised, until she said it, how often I had been doing exactly that — pausing, over these past few days, in front of the small framed photograph of Richard I kept on my desk, the same photograph I had looked at so many times this past year with uncomplicated, grateful love, now studying it with something considerably more complicated, searching, uselessly, for some sign in his careful, dignified expression of whatever truth Margaret Vane's documents might or might not have finally uncovered.

"It is about Grandpa Richard," I admitted finally. "A little bit. I found out something I'm not sure how to feel about yet, and I'm trying to understand it better before I decide what it means."

Lily thought about this seriously, her small face working through it with the particular careful concentration she brought to most difficult things.

"I think," she said finally, "that people can do good things and also do things that weren't good, sometimes even at the same time as each other. Like how Aunt Emma used to be mean but then became brave. Or how Sophia used to make fun of you but now she's nice." She paused. "I don't think finding out something wasn't perfect about Grandpa Richard means all the good things he did aren't true anymore. I think it just means he was a real person, and real people are complicated, not just simple like in stories."

I sat there for a long moment, genuinely struck, once again, by the plain, uncomplicated wisdom of it, arriving from a six-year-old with none of the careful, anxious hedging I had been carrying for days.

"That's exactly right," I said finally, my voice not entirely steady. "That's exactly what I needed to hear."

Lily nodded, satisfied, and returned to her toast, and I sat there watching her, thinking about everything Henry's investigation would need to uncover in the weeks ahead, and understood, finally, that whatever truth we found — about Richard, about the families displaced decades ago, about the full, complicated shape of the fortune that had built this entire family's second chance — I would face it the same way I had faced everything else this past year.

Honestly. Carefully. And, whatever it turned out to cost, without flinching away from whatever the truth actually was.