My stepdad raised me after I lost my mother — just hours before he d*ed, he gripped my hand and whispered, “There’s something I’ve hidden from you your entire life.”

I looked up.

“Catherine didn’t just d*e,” Miriam said.

“The circumstances of her death were never fully explained.

Frank spent years trying to find out what really happened.

And what he eventually discovered — what he found out only recently — is the reason he sent you here tonight.”

She reached past me to the side table and lifted something I hadn’t noticed before.

A second envelope.

Thicker.

Heavier.

“He mailed this to me two weeks ago,” she said.

“He told me that if he d*ed before he could tell you himself, I was to give it to you in person.

Never by post.

Never through anyone else.”

She held it out.

My hand wouldn’t open the second envelope.

I sat there with it in my lap, the weight of it wrong — too heavy for paper, too light for everything it apparently contained — and I couldn’t make my fingers move.

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