Chapter 3 - Someone Answered Her LettersThe gray suitcase sat untouched on the floor of Sage's room for two more days before Gideon finally asked her, gently, if he could look inside it with her.
She said yes, on the condition that he sit on the floor with her rather than the bed, and together they went through it piece by piece — a few changes of clothes worn soft from washing, a stuffed rabbit missing one ear, a school photo of Elise from what looked like a decade earlier, and, tucked into a zippered inner pocket Gideon almost missed entirely, a thick bundle of envelopes tied together with a ribbon that had clearly been retied many times.
They were addressed to him. All of them. Dozens of letters spanning nearly six years, several with return-to-sender stamps, several more that appeared to have simply never been mailed at all, as though Elise had eventually stopped believing they'd reach him and kept writing them anyway.
He read the first one that night after Sage fell asleep, sitting alone in his study with his hands shaking. It was dated eight months after their relationship ended, and it told him, plainly and without asking anything of him, that she was pregnant, that she intended to raise the baby herself, and that she thought he deserved to know regardless of what he chose to do with the information.
He had never received it.
He spent the rest of the night reading the others, watching the tone shift across six years from hopeful to confused to, eventually, resigned — repeated attempts to call a number that, according to one letter, had "stopped working sometime last spring," a certified letter she mentioned sending to his office that had apparently "come back unopened," a final letter, dated just over a year earlier, that read simply: I don't know why nothing I send ever reaches you. I have to believe, for Sage's sake, that you would want to know her if you could. I just don't understand anymore why you don't.
Gideon didn't sleep at all that night. By morning, he'd called Owen Faust and asked him to pull every phone record, mail log, and visitor log tied to Kessler Holdings and Ashcombe Manor going back seven years.
May you like
It took Owen four days to build the picture in full, and when he finally sat across from Gideon with the results, his expression was the particular careful blankness of someone about to deliver news they already knew would land badly.
"Your office number changed seven years ago," Owen said. "Preston requested the change, through IT, the same month you and Ms. Bramwell stopped seeing each other. Mail addressed to you at the Manor from an unrecognized sender has been getting flagged and held for 'security review' by household staff for years — a policy Preston set up himself, officially for your protection." Owen slid a folder across the desk. "Every piece of that mail was logged before being discarded. Elise Bramwell's name appears on that log eleven times."
