Chapter 4
I hired an investigator the following week — not because I suspected anything as dramatic as I eventually found, but because I wanted to understand, clearly, whether Lorna's comment in that entryway had been an isolated cruelty or the surface of something planned in more detail than I wanted to imagine.
What came back was worse than I'd braced for. Lorna had, in the three months before my proposal, made inquiries with two different boarding schools with placement programs specifically for children being relocated by a parent's remarriage — inquiries made under a name close enough to mine that I understood she'd been positioning herself to present it, eventually, as something I'd already agreed to, rather than something she was proposing for the first time.
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She'd also, it turned out, been in early conversation with a property manager about converting the household staff quarters — Lenette's rooms — into what the correspondence described as "guest space," dated to begin roughly one month after our planned wedding date.
None of it had been executed. All of it had been planned, in enough detail that I no longer had any doubt the entryway wasn't a slip of the tongue born of one frustrating afternoon with a broken dish. It was a plan that had simply arrived ahead of its own schedule, spoken out loud because Estelle's accident had made Lorna impatient enough to stop waiting for the wedding to formalize it.
