The Pendant He Had Buried in Memory
Edward took Mara and the baby into a smaller palm room off the main conservatory while a physician checked the infant and a maid brought towels. Mara refused the maid’s hands but accepted a blanket for the child.
Her cheek burned. Her lip had split slightly. Her hands would not stop shaking until she looked down and saw the baby sleeping through the storm of adult shame.
Edward stood across from her in his black ceremonial uniform, rain still shining faintly on his boots. He placed the pendant on the table between them as though it were both evidence and confession.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
Mara touched the bruise rising along her face. “My mother wore it every day. When she died, it was hidden in the hem of her winter coat with a letter telling me never to sell it.”
“Your mother’s name?”
“Rose Ellison.” Mara hesitated. “At least that’s the name she used.”
Edward went still. Really still. The sort of stillness soldiers reached when they were hit somewhere too deep for motion.
He crossed to a cabinet and unlocked a narrow drawer. From it he took a faded photograph: a younger Edward in formal dress beside a laughing young woman whose dark blue eyes matched Mara’s almost exactly.
Around the woman’s neck hung the same pendant.
Mara stared until her breathing changed.
“Who is she?”
Edward answered without looking away from the photo. “Lady Rosamund Sterling. My younger sister.”
The room seemed to tilt. Mara looked from the photograph to the pendant to the face of the man holding both like a wound.
“You’re saying my mother was your sister?”
“I’m saying your mother vanished twenty-nine years ago after a story was forced on this family.” His voice roughened. “We were told she ran away with a petty criminal and wanted no further contact. We were told any child she had was not ours.”
Mara swallowed. “And you believed that?”
Edward’s jaw tightened. “I believed my father was too proud to confess pain and my stepmother was too controlled to lie about blood.”
He was not looking at her when he said stepmother. He was thinking of the woman now standing in the other room pretending her silence was not fear.
Mara untucked the folded letter from inside the baby wrap where she had hidden it for safety. “My mother wrote that if I ever needed the truth, I should find the commander who still wore a scar on his cheek and hated what the family had become.”
Edward gave a short, broken laugh that held no humor at all. “That sounds like Rosamund.”
He opened the letter with hands that were far steadier in battle than in family memory.
May you like
By the time he finished reading, the tremor had returned to his fingers.
“She tried to come back,” he said quietly. “And someone made sure the door stayed shut.”
