“I believe you.” The duke’s voice was low, certain. “The handwriting is close, but not exact. Whoever forged this knew your mother’s hand well enough to imitate it, which means it wasn’t a stranger. It was someone inside your own household.”
The words settled over Serafina like cold water. Inside her own household. Someone who had access to her mother’s letters, her mother’s ledgers, her mother’s private study. Someone with reason to want Genevieve Devereux ruined and reason enough to let her daughter carry the disgrace for twenty years afterward.
“Who,” Serafina said quietly, “would do this to us?”
The duke didn’t answer immediately. He was staring at the forged letter, turning it toward the lamplight, studying the particular slant of a capital G.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But whoever wrote this took extraordinary care to make sure the truth never surfaced. Which tells me two things, Lady Serafina.”
“What things?”
“That your mother’s innocence was worth destroying a family to hide.” He set the letter down. “And that someone in that house has spent twenty years making certain you never asked the right questions.”
Serafina thought of her stepmother’s cold eyes across every dinner table, her stepsisters’ careless cruelty, her father’s refusal to ever look at her directly, and felt, for the first time, that the shame she had carried her whole life did not belong to her at all. It belonged to whoever had written that letter, and she intended to find out who.
The forged letter went missing three days after they found it.
Serafina had locked it in the study’s writing desk herself, the key kept on a chain she never removed. When she opened the drawer that morning, the letter was simply gone. No broken lock, no sign of forced entry.
The master key to the estate’s older furnishings had hung in the housekeeper’s pantry, untouched for a decade, and whoever took the letter knew precisely where to find it. As though the document had never existed at all.
“Someone in this house had a key,” the duke said, his voice flat with controlled fury. “Or someone let them in.”
It was the first crack in what had seemed, until then, a careful and private investigation. More followed quickly.