My Honeymoon Husband Was Going to Drown Me for My Inheritance — Then a Girl with My Face Screamed from Below Deck

Chapter 10

They confronted Marcus in the garden, and for a long moment he just stood there, the pruning shears hanging from his hand, the old song dying in his throat.

“Tell me it isn’t true,” Richard said. He had come up behind them, pale as paper.

Marcus set the shears down very carefully. He looked at Amelia, then at Elara, then at Richard. “I promised Rosalind I would never tell,” he said, “unless all three of you were safe.”

“Three,” Richard repeated. The word seemed to take all his strength.

“Yes.”

“She’s alive?”

“She’s alive.” Marcus reached into his jacket and pulled out a photograph, worn at the edges, held together by years of being carried. A young woman stood in front of a small bookstore, arms crossed, laughing at whoever was taking the picture.

Dark hair. Gray-green eyes.

Amelia’s eyes. Elara’s eyes.

“Her name is Hazel,” Marcus said quietly. “She’s been my niece for twenty-five years. The adoption papers say my late sister’s daughter. The truth is, she’s been mine to protect since the day she was born.”

“Does she know?” Amelia whispered.

“She knows she was adopted.” Marcus looked down at the photograph. “She knows nothing about you. Nothing about the trust. Nothing about any of it. I kept her clean of the whole mess — I thought that was the kindest thing I could do.”

“You thought wrong,” Elara said. It wasn’t a knife in the voice; it was grief. “She’s been alone her whole life, thinking she had no one, and you hid her — ”

“I hid her from Malcolm.” Marcus’s voice cracked. “Malcolm was looking for a third leverage. One twin, he could control. Two, he could pit against each other. Three — he would have done anything to hold three. I kept her invisible because invisible was the only safe way to keep her alive.”

Amelia stared at the photograph. A third sister. A woman who had spent her whole life believing she was an orphan, unaware that she had a twin in a vineyard in Italy and a father who had cried at her birth.

“We’re going to her,” she said.

They flew to Boston three weeks later, after the letters were written and rewritten and crumpled and rewritten again.

The bookstore was on a quiet street in Cambridge, tucked between a bakery and a secondhand shop, a hand-painted sign reading HAZEL & CO. ABOVE THE WINDOW, a hand-lettered slogan: WE ORDER ANYTHING. WE JUDGE EVERYTHING.

Amelia stood across the street for fifteen minutes before she could cross it.

“I can’t do this,” she said.

“You can,” Elara said.

“What if she doesn’t want us?”

“Then we’ll stand on the sidewalk and cry until she changes her mind. It’s worked on every man I’ve ever met.”

Amelia laughed, unsteadily. “You’ve never met any men.”

“I’m planning a test later. You can be the witness.”

They crossed the street.

Amelia knocked. Her knuckles sounded too loud in the quiet afternoon.

Footsteps inside. A shadow moving behind the glass. The door swung open.

The woman from the photograph stood there, an apron over a linen dress, a smear of chalk dust on her cheek from a window sign. She looked from Amelia to Elara, and the chalk in her hand dropped, and she didn’t move.

Neither of them moved.

Then Hazel said, very quietly, “Oh my God.”

She took a step back. Her hand came up — not in fear, but in wonder — pressing against her own face as she looked at two faces that were her face.

“You’re real,” she whispered. “You’re both real.”

Amelia felt the tears come. “We’re real.”

Behind Hazel, on a shelf, Amelia could see a worn paperback copy of the same story their mother had read to them as children, and she thought — they had come home without knowing where home was.

“So,” Hazel said, her voice catching, “which one of you is going to explain why I apparently have two faces standing on my sidewalk?”

Elara smiled. “This might take a while.”

Hazel looked at the street, at the sky, at them again. Then she stepped aside and held the door open.

“I own a bookstore,” she said. “I have time.”