Your father loved you enough to disappear.
Adrian Vale—my father—had supposedly died in a boating accident twenty-three years earlier. His body had never been recovered. My mother died two years after that, and I had been raised by my grandmother with little more than a handful of stories and a trust fund I was forbidden to discuss.
Now the dead man stood in my foyer wearing a charcoal coat and looking at Beatrice as if she were a ghost he had finally come to bury.
Julian laughed uneasily.
“This is ridiculous. Vivian, whoever this man is, he needs to leave.”
“No,” I said. “You need to leave.”
Julian slapped the divorce papers with his palm.
“This house is marital property.”
“Actually,” I replied, “it isn’t.”
His expression hardened. “We’ve lived here for six years.”
