Chapter 2

The room stayed frozen for three full seconds. Cora's hand was still on the call button. Vivienne was still against the wall, her silk blouse wrinkled where the frame had caught it. And Miles stood over his daughter with his eyes fixed on the bedside table, seeing something nobody else in the room could see.

Then he moved.

He walked to the table — not fast, not slow — and picked the object up. It fit in the palm of his hand. It was small, and silver, and old. A cigarette case, monogrammed with the letters M.A. — the initials of his late father, Marcus Ashford the First. The silver was tarnished in the creases, the way old silver gets when it has been handled for thirty years and never polished properly.

His father had been dead for five years. The case had been in Miles's mother's possession since the funeral. She had told everyone she was keeping it for sentimental reasons.

Miles opened it.

Inside, where there should have been nothing but worn velvet lining and the faint smell of tobacco, there was a folded piece of paper. White, lined, the kind torn from a spiral notebook. It was covered in handwriting — a child's handwriting, the letters big and wobbly, the pencil lines pressed hard into the paper.

He unfolded it.

Aria's bedroom at the Ashford estate. The wallpaper with the little rabbits. The window seat where she liked to read. The white desk with the yellow chair.

And under the drawing, in the same wobbly letters:

*Do not look in the closet. She gets mad when you look in the closet.*

Behind him, Aria pushed herself up on her elbows. Her rabbit hung from her hand by one ear.

"Daddy?" she said. "That's my drawing."