Leo confronted Chloe the moment she walked through the door that evening, slamming the police report onto the kitchen island. “What is this?” he demanded, his voice cracking with a mixture of anger and fear. “Are you investigating my grandmother?”
Chloe broke down, tears finally streaming down her face, but her eyes held a fierce, ancient pain that terrified him. “Because those emeralds belonged to my great-grandmother,” she sobbed, pulling a matching vintage earring from her pocket. Her family had kept one surviving earring for decades, the only piece that had not been stolen.
Chloe had wanted to tell him everything much earlier, but how could she accuse the woman who had raised him of a sixty-year-old crime based only on a family photograph and a gut-deep recognition? The pieces fell together in a horrifying rush. A young woman named Adelaide had been a trusted live-in nurse for Chloe’s wealthy ancestors. When the family suffered a sudden financial tragedy, Adelaide had abruptly vanished—along with the family’s most precious heirlooms. The fortune had been missing for sixty years. And what’s more, Adelaide’s description and age matched Evelyn’s!