Page 97 of The Maid's Secret

“Come back for me in a week’s time, once you’re more settled. I’ll have my suitcase ready. We’ll meet at noon at the old oak tree, and you can take me with you to wherever you are. I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.

“We’ll start our lives over. We’ll be a perfect little family, just the four of us.”

I nodded, my tears obscuring my sight. “What will Uncle Willy do for work now?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” said John. “Nobody even knows what a butler is these days. At his age, he may not find another job. He’s worried, but he won’t say it.” He put his hands on my shoulders. “So we have a plan? You’ll meet me at the oak tree in a week’s time? I’ll have a room ready for you, Flora. I can’t promise it’ll be posh, but I’ll take care of you, no matter what.”

“I know,” I said. “I have to go. They can’t catch me here.”

“I love you, Flora,” he said.

I held him tight, and I told him I loved him more than anyone in the world. Then I turned my back on him and ran toward the only life I’d ever known.

—

True to her word, my mother took care of all the details, and a few days later, I was shipped to a birth house far from the manor. There was no way I was going to let John ruin his future the way I had, his only chance at freedom from a life of servitude.

A week later, John would show up at noon at the old oak tree, expecting to find me there, suitcase in hand. But I would be long gone. He would look in the knothole, and there, to his great disappointment, he would discover what the fairies had left for him—a gold treasure, the Claddagh ring, a heart held in two tiny hands.

This is what you do, Molly, for those you love. You make sacrifices, and when you have no other choice, you set them free.

—

Chapter 29

“Molly, your eyes are open and you’re speaking, but I think you’re asleep. You’re not making sense, that’s for sure,” says Juan as he stands in the living room, looking down at me at 5:00a.m.

I’m wrapped in Gran’s quilt on the sofa, cradling her diary like a baby. My eyes are puffy, and I haven’t slept a wink. I know I sound like a lunatic. “I’m wide awake, Juan. I promise you,” I say. “I’ve read every word that Gran wrote. This diary is the answer to everything.”

“Okay,” says Juan. “Explain.”

He sits down beside me. He scratches his bedhead, which is crested like a rooster’s coxcomb. I recount in short form everything I’ve just read about Gran’s early life—how she grew up surrounded by wealth and privilege, yet the opulent manor she lived in was never a warm home. I tell him about her parents, how cruel they could be, how love meant so little to them that they’d even sacrifice their own daughter for financial gain. I introduce him to dear Mrs.Mead, my great-gran-dad’s sister, a mother to so many, a woman who died too young. AndI tell him about my gran-dad, too, who appears on almost every page.

“It’s a love story like no other,” I say. “When you read this, you’ll see Mr.Preston in a different light. He loved Flora with his whole heart, and she loved him with all of hers.”

“Molly, that’s nice,” says Juan. “But what does any of that have to do with the Fabergé?”

“Gran was never a thief,” I say. “Anything she took was hers by right. I know that for a fact.”

“Molly,” Juan says as he grabs my hand. “What about the goldenhuevo?”

I tell him about the Fabergé, how it was given to Gran as an engagement gift, hers and hers alone. I reveal all the pressure put on her to marry Algernon—a fly-by-night, a thief, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and many things even worse. I explain the intricacies, the complications, the dropped clues that Gran wouldn’t have known she was dropping, for she had no idea that the egg would one day find its way back to me, that I would hold it in my hands and keep it on a shelf in her curio cabinet—her history twinkling before my very eyes.

Juan is looking at me like I’ve truly lost the thread.“Café?”he offers. “I think you need some.”

“Please,” I say. “Hear me out.”

He nods and refocuses, trying to put the pieces together.

I recount Gran’s journey after she left the manor, connecting the dots to what must have transpired, leading all the way to her curio cabinet in this apartment.

“Sometimes, it’s not what’s on the page that tells you the most, it’s the blank space in the margins—like the outline at the scene of a crime that proves a body was once there even well after it’s gone.”

I reach for my phone on the side table. I dial a number.

“Who on earth are you calling?” Juan asks. “It’s just after 5:00a.m.”

“Detective Stark,” I reply. “She has to hear this.”

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