Losing him to a car accident before they could marry.
Discovering she was pregnant.
Giving birth to a daughter—
No.
Not daughter.
The letters changed.
Anna had first had a son.
Samuel.
He died as an infant from a congenital heart defect.
Years later, she eventually became pregnant again.
Lucy.
Victoria’s tears fell onto the paper.
The later letters were harder.
Anna wrote that she had tried repeatedly to contact Hale House after their father died.
Someone always intercepted her.
Someone told her Victoria wanted nothing to do with her.
Someone sent money with the condition that Anna stay away.
Victoria looked toward Edward.
He was pale.
The final letter in the bundle was dated six years earlier.
Edward came again today.
Victoria stopped.
Edward took one step backward.
She read aloud.
“‘He says Victoria has built a new life and doesn’t want the scandal. He says if I care about her, I should let her live it.’”
Victoria raised her eyes.
Edward whispered, “I can explain.”
She stood.
“You knew.”
“Victoria—”
“You knew she was alive.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“You knew.”
Her voice echoed through the room.
Edward lowered his eyes.
“For how long?”
He did not answer.
“How long?”
“Since I was twenty-one.”
Victoria stared at him.
More than two decades.
She crossed the room and slapped him.
The sound cracked through the silence.
Edward did not move.
“You let me bury her.”
Tears streamed down Victoria’s face.
“You stood next to me every year on her birthday while I put flowers by that river.”
“Our uncle told me the truth after your father died.”
“And you said nothing.”
“He made me promise.”
“He was dead!”
“You don’t understand what your father had done. There were financial crimes, forged trust papers, land transfers—”
“I don’t care!”
“You should. Hale House would have collapsed.”
Victoria laughed through tears.
“So you chose the house.”
“I chose you.”
“No. You chose money.”
“I protected everything you built.”
“You stole my sister from me.”
Edward’s face cracked.
“I thought Anna would eventually move on.”
“She wrote to me for twenty-eight years.”
He had no answer.
Victoria held the letters against her chest.
Then another thought hit her.
“Lucy said Anna gave her a letter before she died.”
Edward looked at her.
“If these are here… what was in the final letter?”
Neither spoke.
Then from downstairs came the sound of glass breaking.
Victoria ran.
She found Margaret in the front hall.
The old housekeeper was terrified.
Lucy was gone.
The front door stood open.
On the floor lay the child’s pale-blue hair ribbon.
And beside it—
A handwritten note.
Bring the letters to the old river bridge. Come alone.
PART THREE — WHAT ANNA LEFT BEHIND
Victoria did not come alone.
She simply made sure whoever had taken Lucy believed she did.
The police wanted time.
Victoria refused to give them much.
A child had already spent enough years paying for the choices of the Hale family.
The old river bridge sat fourteen miles outside Charleston, near an abandoned mill road surrounded by marsh grass and live oaks.
It had been the last place search crews looked for Anna twenty-eight years earlier.
Victoria now understood why.
Her father had chosen the location deliberately.
He had staged the disappearance there.
The jacket.
The blood.
The tire marks.
A grave without a body.
Victoria parked her car near the entrance to the bridge.
The letters sat in a leather bag beside her.
An unmarked police vehicle waited nearly half a mile back.
Detective Marcus Lane had been very clear.
Do not confront anyone.
Do not provoke them.
Do not attempt a rescue alone.
Victoria had agreed.
She had not promised obedience.
She stepped from the car.
“Lucy!”
Wind moved through the marsh.
Nothing.
Then a figure appeared beneath the old bridge structure.
Edward.