Adrian stopped moving.

Vanessa stared at Mara as if she had just spoken in a language no one else could understand.

“What are you talking about?” Adrian asked.

Mara swallowed hard. “Put me down.”

“No.”

“Adrian, please.”

He looked at her bare feet, her trembling knees, the red scrape along one forearm.

“You almost fell twenty feet.”

“I need you to see something.”

Vanessa’s voice sharpened. “She needs a hospital, not an audience.”

Adrian turned toward her.

“Then call an ambulance.”

Vanessa didn’t move.

That was the second thing he noticed.

The first was fear.

The second was that Vanessa, who always knew what to do in a crisis, had not once reached for her phone.

Adrian lowered Mara carefully onto a cushioned bench near the landing.

Mara gripped his sleeve.

“Your mother had a wall safe behind the painting in her study.”

“I know.”

“She showed me the code before she died.”

Vanessa laughed once, but there was no humor in it.

“This is insane.”

Mara looked at Adrian. “She said if anything ever happened to her papers, I was supposed to tell you.”

Adrian felt his stomach turn.

His mother, Eleanor Cole, had died six months earlier after what doctors called a massive stroke.

She had been seventy-two, stubborn, sharp, and healthy enough to walk three miles every morning.

Her death had made no sense.

But grief rarely did.

Adrian had stopped asking questions because the answers hurt too much.

Now Mara was making him question all of them again.

“What papers?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She never showed me. She just said they were proof.”

Vanessa stepped forward. “Adrian, listen to yourself. You’re letting a houseguest who nearly killed herself accuse me of—what exactly?”

Mara flinched.

Adrian saw it.

Not at the words.

At Vanessa’s movement.

He stepped between them.

“Stay there.”

Vanessa’s mouth fell open.

He had never spoken to her that way.

Not in three years.

He looked at Mara. “Why were you near the balcony?”

“She asked me to meet her.”

“Why?”

Mara’s gaze moved to Vanessa.

“Because I found the safe open.”

Silence.

Adrian’s skin prickled.

“Open?”

Mara nodded.

“And empty.”

Adrian turned toward Vanessa.

She crossed her arms. “I have access to this house. That does not mean I robbed it.”

“No one said you did.”

Her eyes flickered.

Too fast.

Mara saw it too.

Adrian did not accuse her.

He simply walked toward his mother’s study.

Vanessa called after him. “Where are you going?”

“To look.”

The study door was unlocked.

The painting behind the desk hung slightly crooked.

Adrian moved it aside.

The safe door stood open.

Inside was nothing but a thin layer of dust and one small object.

A broken pearl earring.

He knew it immediately.

Vanessa had worn the matching pair at dinner the night before his mother died.