Chapter 7
Story: She Slapped Her at the Estate Reception, Then a Photograph Fell From the Old Jacket
The scheduled hearing was the following week, and Wren spent the night before it in her apartment, Theo already asleep in the next room. The photograph lay on the table, the sign still pinned to his chest.
She picked up the phone and called the one number she'd been avoiding all week. It rang once, twice, and Rosalind answered.
"Wren."
"Come over," Wren said. "We need to talk before tomorrow."
The doorbell rang an hour later. Rosalind stood in the doorway, different — cream blazer gone, hair loose, face bare. She looked tired in a way Wren had never seen before.
"How is Theo?" Rosalind asked.
"Asleep," Wren said. "He doesn't know about any of this. I want it to stay that way."
Rosalind stepped inside, keeping her distance. Wren led her to the kitchen table, where the photograph lay flat.
"Is this why you did it?" Wren asked. "Because you knew what Dorothy planned to do, and you thought signing the page would let you control it?"
Rosalind sat down across the table, her eyes on the photograph. She didn't touch it.
"I thought," she said slowly, "that if I signed, Dorothy would trust me. That I could get her to back down. I thought I could protect him." She looked up. "I was wrong. I know I was wrong. But I also know — the day you found that photograph in Dad's jacket — I knew Dorothy would do this eventually. I just couldn't stop it."
Wren studied her sister's face, looking for the lie, looking for the excuse, looking for anything other than the truth.
She saw only exhaustion and grief.
"You should have told me," Wren said. "You should have trusted me. We could have stopped it together."
"I know."
Both women let the silence sit.
This, Wren understood, was the real consequence. Not the signature on a page. Not the plan Dorothy had set in motion. The consequence was this: her sister stood at a table, and the trust between them was paper-thin now, cracked in a way that would take years to mend.
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