Chapter 4 - The House With the Blue Porch
The old family house stood outside Hartford, four hours away.
Marianne still owned it, although she preferred telling people she lived at her second residence.
Lena remembered the blue porch, the warped screen door, and the birdhouse their father had built during his last healthy summer.
She also remembered Sophia calling it ugly.
Sheriff Bell passed the information to investigators.
Julian reached for his coat.
“No,” Lena said.
He stopped.
“You don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You’re going to tell yourself going there is the same thing as helping.”
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he laid the coat over his chair.
“What would help?”
The question unsettled her.
“Stay reachable. Give them the property records. Tell them everything you know about Renata.”
He nodded.
No argument.
Agnes took the twins to her sister’s house under a safety plan arranged with Bell. Before leaving, Eli approached Julian.
“Are you really our father?”
The room went quiet.
Julian knelt.
“Yes.”
Eli considered him.
“Mommy said you didn’t know about us.”
“I didn’t.”
“Would you have come?”
Lena looked away.
Julian’s answer came softly.
“Yes. But I understand that doesn’t give me those years back.”
Eli studied the floor.
“Mara thinks you have a castle.”
“I have a house that’s too big.”
“Does it have sharks?”
“No.”
“That’s good. She wants sharks.”
A surprised laugh escaped Julian.
It broke halfway through.
Eli held out his drawing.
The boat had four stick figures and a purple sail.
“You can keep this,” he said. “It’s not a promise.”
Julian accepted it carefully.
“I understand.”
That evening, an investigator called.
Sophia had been found in an upstairs bedroom at the Connecticut property. Two men fled when officers arrived; one was detained nearby. She was being taken to a hospital for evaluation.
Marianne was not at the house.
Neither was Marco.
Inside the birdhouse, investigators found a small memory card wrapped in plastic.
Sophia had hidden it there weeks earlier.
Lena sat down hard.
“She kept it.”
Julian stood by the window.
“Apparently.”
“You sound angry.”
“I am.”
“She was frightened.”
“She also helped steal five years from you.”
“Both can be true.”
He turned.
For a second, something almost like relief crossed his face.
“Yes,” he said. “They can.”
Later, Lena met Sophia through a video call arranged by an investigator.
Her sister looked smaller without makeup and expensive clothing. A bruise shadowed one cheek. A blanket covered her shoulders.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” Sophia said.
“Good.”
Sophia nodded.
Lena expected defensiveness.
Instead, her sister looked at the blanket.
“Marco came to me after you disappeared. He said Julian would never want me, but there was money available if I helped him finish things.”
“Finish what?”
“Make you unreachable. Keep Julian distracted. I thought he meant ending your engagement.”
“What did he actually mean?”
Sophia swallowed.
“Daniel had sent you something.”
Lena frowned.
“No, he hadn’t.”
“He sent it through your old work email. The consulting account.”
She hadn’t opened that account since leaving Julian’s estate. It had belonged to a business she closed before the twins were born.
“Why me?”
“Because you handled the charity books. He thought you’d recognize the payments.”
Julian moved closer to the screen.
“What payments?”
Sophia stared at him.
“The ones Marco told you were legitimate.”
An investigator ended the call shortly afterward. Sophia needed rest, and formal interviews would continue with her lawyer present.
Lena opened a notebook.
For years, she had treated her former life as a locked room.
Now she needed to remember every drawer inside it.
There had been a foundation account.
A scholarship program.
Payments to a transport company with unusually round invoices.
She wrote its name.
Northstar Coastal Logistics.
Julian saw it and went still.
“What?”
“That company belongs to Renata.”
Lena lowered her pen.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t.”
She could see the original paperwork in her memory.
A signature at the bottom.
An ownership declaration.
May you like
A woman’s maiden name.
“My mother signed for that company,” she whispered.
