“Because it was wrong.”
I looked down at the paperwork again. “Jeremy heard them fighting.”
Nora nodded. “Yes.”
“Yes.”
I gripped the edge of the table. “Tell me the part that matters most. Did Zane lie about what happened at the lake?”
Nora replied at once. “No. Janice’s death was an accident.”
I closed my eyes.
It should have brought relief.
It did not.
Because now I understood the shape of Jeremy’s fear.
At five years old, he had overheard a threat, seen his sister frightened, gone to the lake the following day, and watched her vanish.
For eight years, he had probably believed they were taken there because of what Janice had heard.
“Why didn’t Zane tell me any of this?” I asked.
Nora slowly exhaled. “Because after Janice died, everything became about grief. Jeremy stopped speaking. Your marriage started breaking in slow motion. Zane told himself the timing made the truth too dangerous. Then time passed, and shame did what it always does. It got heavier.”
She placed one final document before me.
It was a recent letter from Zane.
In it, he admitted Dean had altered the company books, that Nora had saved our home, and that his silence had cost her a career, her reputation, and years she could never recover.
