Chapter 1 - THE ENVELOPE BEHIND THE PORTRAIT
Anna Reed had spent eight months learning how to survive inside the DeLuca mansion.
At thirty-two, divorced and raising her nine-year-old daughter Lily, she couldn’t afford to lose the $4,600-a-month housekeeping job that paid for rent, groceries, and Lily’s asthma medication.
So Anna endured Gabriel DeLuca’s fiancée, Lauren Whitmore.
The insults.
The impossible demands.
The accusations.
Then, six days before an important dinner, everything changed.
While cleaning the abandoned west wing, Anna overheard Lauren arguing with seventy-eight-year-old Evelyn Shaw, the housekeeper who had served the DeLuca family for forty-six years.
Evelyn warned Lauren that Gabriel could never discover who had really been in the car with his mother twenty-seven years earlier.
Anna accidentally knocked down an old portrait.
Behind it, she discovered a hidden compartment containing a yellow envelope addressed to Gabriel.
She hid it.
From that moment, Lauren seemed determined to drive her from the house.
At dinner, Lauren deliberately knocked a bowl of hot soup from Anna’s hands and ordered her to kneel and clean the shattered porcelain.
Gabriel stopped her.
Then Evelyn revealed that Anna had not dropped the bowl.
A torn piece of yellowed paper appeared beneath Lauren’s chair, marked with the initials E.S.H.
Nobody would explain them.
Later, Anna received threatening messages demanding the hidden envelope—and warning that Lily would suffer if Anna refused.
Gabriel realized someone was frightening her.
Together they returned to the west-wing library.
There, Evelyn finally admitted that she had lied about the night Gabriel’s mother, Catherine DeLuca, supposedly died in a car accident.
Anna produced the envelope.
Its seal had already been disturbed.
A pale blond hair was embedded in the wax.
Gabriel immediately suspected Lauren.
But Evelyn told him something far worse.
The woman who died in the accident twenty-seven years earlier had not been Catherine DeLuca.
Then a black sedan arrived outside.
Footsteps approached the library.
Lauren called Gabriel’s name.
The door slowly opened.
May you like
And Gabriel saw a woman’s hand—
wearing the emerald wedding ring he had buried with his mother.
