"Sterling," Genevieve whispered.
She knew the name. Everyone knew it. Lord Sterling was among the most respected men in the county, a fixture of every great gathering—a man who had grown vastly richer in the very years her own family had been ruined.
"He took everything: the estate, the lands... he absorbed them all after the trial." Her voice cracked. "He did not merely profit from our ruin; he built it! He stole the money, framed my father with the theft, and let the law do the rest, so he might swallow our house and keep his crime hidden!"
"Behind a dead man's disgrace," Arthur said grimly. He closed the ledger and held it as though it were made of glass. "This is proof, Genevieve. Real proof, in your father's own hand, written before the trial. No court could ignore it."
She pressed her hand to her mouth, and the tears she had held back for ten years finally came—not of grief now, but of hope. After a decade of silence, of scrubbing floors under a false name, she held in her hands the truth that could give her father back his honor.
"We have him," she breathed.
"We have him," Arthur agreed.
Neither of them knew that miles away, a brooch was at that moment being slipped beneath the mattress of Genevieve's empty room.
Morning broke bright over Ashworth Hall on the final day of the summit, and the great house woke to a flurry of preparation.
The grand ballroom was being dressed for the evening gala: its floors waxed to a shine, its chandeliers lowered on chains so that footmen could fit each candle by hand, great arrangements of summer roses carried in from the gardens. Servants hurried in every direction. The guests, rested from the night, drifted down to a late breakfast and spoke of the dancing to come.
Genevieve had returned before dawn. She had slipped back into the house through the kitchen door, her heart still pounding from the night's discovery, the precious ledger left safely in Arthur's keeping. She washed, changed into her plain working dress, and reported to the study as though nothing in the world had altered, though everything had. She kept her face calm and her hands steady, and only the brightness in her eyes might have betrayed her, had anyone thought to look.