I turned to
Samuel. “We’re going back.”
Emma stepped closer. “Carefully.”
“I know.”
“No,” she said, placing a hand on my arm. “Together. Not as a man storming his house. As someone they underestimate.”
I looked at her then—not as the wounded woman from the kitchen, not as someone I had to rescue, but as the person who had survived inside the lie long enough to map its walls.
“You have a plan,” I said.
A faint smile touched her face.
“I have two years of practice.”
By noon, we returned to the mansion with Samuel and two private auditors he trusted. I did not warn my family. The same security guard from the night before opened the gate, and when he saw Emma sitting beside me in the car, he looked down with visible shame.
Inside, the house was quiet.
Too quiet.
The dining room had been cleaned. The flowers were gone.
