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them to her now?
    It wasn’t what she’d expected from Aunt Caroline, no, not at all … .
    Truth realized with an unfolding sense of dismay that
she’d never really known her aunt. Not what she’d expected. No. Not what a woman who blamed Thorne Blackburn for her sister’s murder would have done. “I never wanted you to hate him … .” But what else could Aunt Caroline have expected?
    Could she have expected anything else?
    Truth closed her hands tightly over the serpentine length of the necklace, half-hoping the force would crack the amber beads. All these years she’d just assumed that Aunt Caroline was as disgusted with Blackburn as Truth was, when the reality …
    She could see it so clearly now.
    Aunt Caroline and the house had been waiting since Katherine died in 1969. Frozen in time. Waiting—
    How could she ever have been so blind? It was so obvious. All you had to do was look … .
    Waiting.
    Waiting until Caroline could join Katherine in death.
    Waiting until Caroline could join Thorne Blackburn.
    Caroline Jourdemayne had loved Thorne Blackburn.
    It was as if the world had suddenly tilted 180 degrees. All the unexamined facts of Truth’s past, carefully buried and unquestioned, rose up as if embodying another’s will and assembled themselves to form an unwelcome and bitterly plausible history.
    Hadn’t Caroline Jourdemayne also been at Shadow’s Gate the night Katherine Jourdemayne had died and Blackburn had vanished? She had, and all these years Truth had never wondered why—but Caroline Jourdemayne couldn’t have known how necessary her presence would be. She must simply have been—visiting.
    Her sister and her friend.
    Her lover ?
    The past suddenly seemed real, here in this room—Truth could see them all together; Katherine, trusting and helplessly fond; Caroline, skeptical and seeing danger
ahead, trying to be the practical one but powerless to avert the tragedy that claimed the two people she loved most. And Thorne Blackburn.
    Truth closed her eyes tightly. No—no—no … This isn’t true. It can’t be true!
    But it made so much sense. Why keep a photograph of a man you hated? Why save his things for his daughter if you didn’t think his memory was worth preserving?
    Caroline had loved him.
    Truth sat down slowly on the bed. Her jaws ached with the force of the denial she would not give voice to. Everything she’d ever believed had been a lie, and all this, all the rest of Caroline Jourdemayne’s life, had been spent behind the veil of withdrawn nunlike asceticism that Truth had tried to pierce in vain, spent as though Caroline Jourdemayne had dedicated herself to the chaste worship of Thorne Blackburn down through all the lonely years she had spent raising his daughter.
    And she’d thought it had all been done for love of Katherine, Truth mocked herself bleakly. Wrong.
    She didn’t love me. She loved him. Truth heard the cheated little-girl voice inside her mind and could not force it down. Aunt Caroline had loved Thorne Blackburn. Still. Now. Always. If she had hated him she would not have been there, always there—and there the one night the two of them—the three of them—had needed her most.
    And when, in her teens, Truth had begun to know who he had been and to speak out against Thorne Blackburn, Aunt Caroline had never said a word.
    Hoping I’d change my mind? There’ll be blizzards in Hell first, Truth thought grimly. The grief growing in her was too deep for words.
    He’s taken everything. He left me nothing.
    Not her mother, not her mother’s love—not even, in the end, her aunt’s. It had all, all, all been for Thorne Blackburn, and nothing for his daughter.

    Nothing. Nothing left. No time …
    There was one more thing in the box.
    A book.
    She lifted it out carefully. It was about nine inches by twelve—a little larger than a modern