Chapter 35 Inherited Secrets
Sloane
The house was too quiet after Aunt Claire left.
I stood in the hallway long after the door had clicked shut, my fingers still curled around the silver frame.
The silence pressed in on me from all sides, thick and expectant, as though the walls themselves were holding their breath. I barely noticed how much time passed. Minutes blurred into something heavier.
The frame felt cold against my palms.
I stared at the photograph again, even though I already knew every detail of it now. Cade, younger, softer around the edges.
And Lily. Alive, laughing, unaware of how short her future would be. She looked so ordinary. So human. Nothing about her suggested she belonged to a secret worth killing for.
And yet my aunt had gone white at the sight of her.
If Lily had been murdered, and I was no longer naïve enough to doubt that, and if a single glimpse of her face had shaken Aunt Claire so badly, then my family was hiding something far worse than quiet corruption or questionable business practices.
They were hiding a body.
I heard the low rumble of Cade’s car pulling into the driveway about an hour later. The sound cut through my thoughts like a blade. My heart gave a slow, heavy thud against my ribs.
I didn’t move.
I didn’t tuck the photo back onto the shelf or busy myself with something harmless. I stayed exactly where I was, standing in the dim hallway light like a confession I hadn’t decided how to make yet.
The front door opened. Keys clinked softly. The door shut again.
Cade stepped inside, loosening his tie as he went. His jacket was slung over his arm, his shirt wrinkled from a long day that had clearly asked too much of him. For a split second, he looked like any other man coming home from work.
Then his eyes found me.
He froze.
“Sloane?” His voice was low, careful. “What are you doing over there?”
I glanced down at the photo, at Lily’s smiling face, and then back up at him.
My chest tightened.
I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to tell him how Aunt Claire had stared at Lily like she’d seen a ghost. How her hands had trembled. How fear, not grief, not nostalgia, had cracked through her perfect composure.
I wanted to tell him that I was starting to believe my uncle wasn’t just a criminal, but something far worse.
But I couldn’t.
I didn’t know what Cade would do with that knowledge. With incomplete information
If I told him my family recognized the girl he loved, the girl who had been murdered, he might snap.
He might go to their house tonight. He might confront Richard with nothing but rage and suspicion and grief in his hands.
And Cade, for all his control, was still one man standing against a family that seemed to own half the city.
I couldn’t let him walk into that blind, not until I offered something concrete
So I watered it down.
“Aunt Claire came by,” I said. I kept my voice steady, even though my throat felt tight. “She wanted to check on me after the engagement dinner. She was looking around the house. We ended up talking about some of the photos.”
Cade took a few slow steps closer. His gaze flicked to the frame, then back to my face. He didn’t look like he was trying to catch me in a lie. He just looked… alert.
“Okay,” he said.
The word landed softly, but it didn’t mean nothing. It meant noted.
The silence stretched between us. I could feel it pressing against my skin. I hadn’t told him the most important part yet, the part that had nothing to do with Lily, and everything to do with my grandmother.
“She asked me something,” I said finally. “About my grandmother.”
That did it.
Cade turned fully toward me now, curiosity sharpening his expression. Not fear. Not anger. Just attention. “What did she ask?”
“She wanted to know why my grandmother wanted me to marry you. Specifically. If she’d ever given me a real reason.”
His jaw tightened slightly. Not defensively, but thoughtfully. “And what did you tell her?”
I thought back to the beginning of all of this. To the funeral. To Cade’s office, cold and formal, where my life had been laid out like a contract instead of a choice.
“I remembered what you said,” I told him. “That your mother knew my grandmother. So I told Claire maybe she didn’t want things to end the way they did. That maybe she wanted to fix the past.”
The hallway fell quiet again.
Cade didn’t speak right away. He looked like he was searching his memory, sifting through old conversations, old silences.
“Did your mother ever say how they knew each other?” I asked. “Or how well?”
He exhaled slowly. “No. She wasn’t very open about her past. But she knew about us. About you and me, back then.”
I nodded, gripping the frame tighter. “I’ve just been wondering,” I said. “We know my grandmother suspected the family. We know she didn’t trust Richard. But what if she knew more than that?”
My heart started to race. “What if she knew everything? Not just about what was happening at the hotels. But about Lily too?”
The words hung between us, fragile and dangerous.
“What if this marriage wasn’t about reconciliation at all?” I continued quietly. “What if it was the only way she knew to make sure the truth didn’t die with her?”
Cade went very still.
He didn’t look angry. He didn’t look relieved. He looked like a man seeing the edges of a much larger picture for the first time, and realizing how carefully it had been hidden from him.
Neither of us spoke after that.
Later that night, the house was dark. Cade was in the other room, but sleep refused to come. My skin buzzed with restlessness, with the sharp awareness that something had shifted.
I couldn’t just sit with this anymore.
I pulled myself up in the darkness, my resolve settling into place.
If Aunt Claire knew that girl’s face, then there had to be a record of it somewhere.
If my grandmother was connected to this more than I thought, she would have left a trail.
I wasn't going to wait for the truth to find me. I wasn’t going to be a pawn anymore.
If I was part of this, then I was going to move first.