Descended (The Red Blindfold Book 2) (18 page)

“Pull yourself
together,” I whispered. “Right now.”

I could scream out loud
or write a scathing response, but I would not cry anymore. Crying
felt like falling apart, and I’d die before I let Marc reduce me to
a quivering mess.

Glad
about your father, see you later
, I wrote back. No
reaction, nothing that betrayed how I really felt.

Too agitated to sit
still, I got up and paced from room to room. The house was a drafty
maze that seemed to go on forever. If I didn’t pay attention I
might get lost like Sade’s letter, never to be seen again. Wherever
I looked there was a mystery – an old book written in a strange
language, a locked cabinet, a ghostly boudoir filled with
sheet-draped furniture, the bureau drawers open as if someone had
packed in a rush and fled for their lives.

Just off the kitchen, I
discovered a narrow door. It opened to a stone staircase leading down
into darkness. The old cellar Marc had mentioned during my first
visit.

Though there was no
light switch, I found a flashlight in one of the kitchen drawers. The
yellow beam sputtered as I went down holding the rope banister. I
resisted the urge to run back to the kitchen, and stepped off the
bottom stair.

Squinting through the
gloom, I started down a narrow corridor leading under the chateau.
The ceiling had crumbled in places, leaving the dirt floor strewn
with chips of stone. To my left was a room filled racks of wine
barrels and dusty bottles. I kept walking, eventually coming to a
storage room crowded with remnants of the estate’s past – chipped
steamer trunks, a stuffed fox with glass eyes, damaged paintings in
twisted frames. Spilling from a wooden crate was a pile of old
letters and opened envelopes.

Flashlight propped on a table, I
sifted through pages of faded stationery. I found nothing written by
Sade, but came across a letter from Marc’s mother, written to Simon
two years after their divorce. As soon as I glanced at it, Marc’s
name jumped out at me.

As for Marc, of course he’ll be angry if he finds out, but I
don’t see how he would. My parents are dead and no one in your
family wants to stir up the past. He’s only sixteen and his life
has been complicated enough. Already he feels detached from us, and
this knowledge would only add to that. The damage could be
irreparable.

She ended with an
elaborate signature –
Elise
.
Feeling like a thief, I went through the rest of the papers hoping to
find another mention of Marc, but there was only a brief comment
about his acceptance to Stanford. Maybe his suspicion that he was
another man’s son was true. If only there was more evidence.

The corridor ended in a
stone wall under the house. I went back upstairs and stood in the
main hall. Where else could I look? I’d explored the rooms on this
floor, but hadn’t been to the library.

The thought of its
hodge-podge of nooks and drawers made me feel defeated, but I had to
try.

It was terrible, but
looking for Sade’s letter gave me all the reason I needed to go
through the Braydens’ belongings. I only wanted to find a work of
great historical value and return it to them. If I discovered
anything else, it would be purely by accident.

I started with the
desk, which contained nothing but bills and receipts, along with a
daily diary filled with Simon’s angled scrawl. There were shelves
of appliance manuals and cabinets of bank records, but I found
nothing about Marc. Not a single word.

After a fruitless hour
I sat down against a wall and wiped my grime-blackened hands on my
jeans. It was then that I noticed the sliding door under the built-in
bench by the spiral stairs. I walked over to it and knelt down.

Fitting my thumb into
the nearly-invisible finger hole, I slid it open.

It took a minute for my
eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. There was nothing but piles of
old newspapers and in the back corner, a small metal box. I pulled it
out and brushed off a coating of dust. The lock on the lid was so
rusty it gave way under the pressure of my hands. No one had opened
this box in a long time.

Inside were deeds
written in French, copies of birth certificates for Simon and
Eleanor, keys to a safe deposit box. At the bottom under an old check
register was a legal document dated almost thirty years ago.

Nothing about it meant
anything to me, except the name typed on the first page: Annabel
Brayden. Annabel. The aunt who’d died young of an overdose.

The letterhead was from
a London law firm. I glanced through the first few paragraphs,
calling up what little legalese I’d learned before dropping out of
law school. It had something to do with Annabel’s death – her
last wishes, maybe, or instructions for passing on her possessions.

I flipped through the
pages impatiently, suddenly tired of the whole thing. What the hell
was I looking for, an explanation for this strange detour in my life?
A clue to the impossibly complicated man I’d fallen in love with?

I pushed everything
back into the box and slid it under the bench out of sight. If only
I’d done things differently. If I had resisted Marc from the start,
I’d be in New York now, having avoided all the joy of knowing him
but all the pain as well. Anything would have been better than this
constant limbo.

As I was standing to
go, a phrase flitted through my mind.
Natural
mother.

Natural mother? Where
had I seen those words?

I knelt and pulled the box out
again, flipping through deeds and photographs with trembling hands. I
spread the legal documents in front of me, five wrinkled pages in
all. This time, I knew what they were.

Natural mother, Annabel Brayden. Natural father, unknown.
Adoptive
mother, Elise Bertrand Brayden. Adoptive father, Simon James
Brayden.
The child, male, six months five days old.
Marc
Alexandre Brayden.

I re-read the lines to
make sure there was no mistake. Carefully putting the pages back in
order, I replaced them at the bottom of the box. I made sure the box
was all the way under the bench behind the newspapers, and closed the
door.

Everything Marc had
ever believed about himself was wrong.

It was true, after all.
Simon wasn’t his father. But Marc wasn’t even related to the
woman he thought was his mother, which meant he wasn’t related to
Sade. Everything he found so unforgivable on that side of the family
-- none of it was connected to him by blood and never had been. His
torment was for nothing, a waste of time based on a deception.

He’d be back from the
hospital soon, but I could not tell him what I’d found.

This was too big for
me, for us. He’d want to know – he
needed
to know – but Simon and Eleanor had kept it from him for reasons I
might never understand. If I showed him the papers, there was no
telling what disaster might result.

I’d be keeping a
momentous secret from him, but I had no choice. The secret hadn’t
been mine to discover, and it wasn’t mine to share.

An hour later, Marc
stood in the bedroom changing his shirt and telling me about his day
at the hospital. Warm lamplight reflected off his bare chest and
stomach, making his chiseled muscles gleam. Knowing what I knew now,
he looked even more incredible to me.

This brilliant,
beautiful man had come from the saddest of circumstances, a blessing
out of tragedy.

I was bursting with
questions I could never ask. Where was his biological father? Had
Annabel really died from an overdose? What had made her so unhappy
that she would risk leaving her infant son without a mother?

Marc described
Eleanor’s impatience with the nurses and Simon’s delight at being
the center of attention. I sat on the edge of the bed wearing a
frozen smile.

He had no idea. Surely
Eleanor knew, being so much older, but if she’d wanted him to know
she would have told him. She couldn’t understand the suffering it
caused him – or maybe she did and it didn’t matter.

“I have a gift for
you,” I said, taking a piece of paper from the nightstand.

“A gift?” he said,
slipping a slim gray t-shirt over his head.

“It’s something I
found in the library this afternoon.”

Brow creasing, he
walked over to me and took the paper from my hand. He glanced at it,
his eyes slowly widening. “Wow,” he said. “Is this for real?”

I feigned excitement.
“That’s the letter you’ve been looking for, isn’t it?”

He shook his head in
disbelief. “The corner is torn, there’s water damage – it has
to be,” he said in a stunned voice. “I can’t believe you found
it.”

“I didn’t know what
I had at first,” I said, sickeningly aware of the double meaning of
my words.

He grinned as if I’d
just conjured the past itself from thin air. “Unreal. We’ve been
searching for this forever. Where was it?”

“In a biography of
your grandfather, on one of the shelves in the library. Maybe
somebody used it to mark the page without knowing what it was.”

I hadn’t even been
looking for it. I’d opened the book hoping to find more information
about Annabel, but it was written before she was born.

“What made you look
there?”

“Just a feeling,” I
said, amazed at how easily the words rolled off my tongue.

“We’ve never gone
through all those books. None of us thought the letter might be
there.”

“It’s a great
postscript to the article,” I said. “If it’s okay with you,
I’ll revise the ending and send it to Katherine tomorrow, along
with a photograph.”

He kissed me on the
forehead. “Eleanor will be thrilled. It could increase the value of
all the documents when they go to auction. Do you mind if I call her
now? She’s coming by in a few hours but I don’t want to wait.”

“Go ahead,” I said.
“I’ll start dinner.”

I couldn’t believe he
didn’t see my secret burned across my face like a mark of shame.
I’ve spent the day trolling
through Simon’s belongings, discovering something you desperately
need to know.

After his call, he came
down to the kitchen and thanked me again for finding the letter. He
helped me cook and clean up, chatting all the while, unaware of my
deception. I made no mention of last night, or the tension that
crackled in every word we said. I even laughed – a vibrant sound,
so believable – when Marc mentioned his father’s horrified
response to the hospital lunch menu.

When had I become such
an accomplished liar? Was I really the kind of woman who pried into a
family’s past, who stalked suicidal ex-girlfriends and drunkenly
threw herself at waiters?

Had a few short weeks with Marc
changed me that much?

It was after dark when
Eleanor came by in her rented Mercedes to pick up some things for her
father. Marc was in the library on a late call with one of his
partners, leaving me alone with his sister.

“My father can’t
live without his slippers and his crossword puzzles,” she said,
coming down from Simon’s room with a small duffel bag. “But I’ll
be damned if I’ll bring him the Scotch. We’ve tolerated that long
enough.”

“Do you have
everything he needs?” I asked.

“I have instructions
not to return to the hospital unless I do. I’d love to bring him
the letter you found but I don’t dare take it with me. Incredible
how you discovered it.”

“It was an accident,”
I said. “Dumb luck.”

“Well, I’ll have to
look at it when I’m not waiting on my father hand and foot. Please
tell Marc I’ll meet him at the hospital tomorrow.”

“I will,” I said.
“It was nice seeing you.”

“And you.” She took
a few steps across the foyer, and then stopped as if she’d
remembered something. “Are you staying in France long, Sophie? I
thought you were here for just a week or so.”

That
was before I upended my life to be with your brother
.
“I’ve been working on two more articles, restaurants and real
estate.”

“Interesting subjects
to write about, I’m sure.” She slung the handle of the bag over
her shoulder. “I should be off. My father will think I’m dead in
a ditch.”

Marc was still in the
library. This was the time, if I could only find my voice. “Before
you go…”

“Yes?”

“When I came across
the letter –” I stopped to clear my throat. “Well, I found
something else I wish I hadn’t seen.”

She gave me a quick
smile. “Sade wrote a lot of outrageous things. You can only read so
much before feeling thoroughly disgusted.”

“Well – no,
actually,” I said. “This wasn’t something Sade wrote.”

She gave me an
impatiently quizzical look. “What was it, then?”

“Something having to
do with Marc. Uh, Marc and your aunt Annabel.”

“Annabel,” she
repeated. For a long, uncomfortable moment she stared at me in
silence.

“The legal documents,
I suppose?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Though I braced for
rage and defensiveness, she only looked sad. Sad and a little
resigned.

“Where did you find
them?” she asked.

“In a metal box in
the library. Under the bench near the stairs.”

“I see,” she said
quietly. “Well, it’s not your fault. I told my father years ago
to keep important papers in a safe-deposit box. My mother had only a
few letters at her house mentioning it and I got rid of them before
Marc came to pack her things.”

She paused, her mouth
set as if she were prepared for the worst. “You’re going to tell
him, I suppose.”

“No,” I said. “It
isn’t my place.”

She scanned my face,
obviously trying to discern my intentions. “I’m happy you think
so,” she said. “He must never know.”