All Chapters of The wrong vow: I BECAME MY EX'S AUNT : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"Smile, Sweetheart".---"You look thinner," Victoria said, pulling Maya into a hug at the door. "Married life not feeding you, sweetheart?"Maya hugged her back "I know what you are now. And you have no idea that I know." maya thought."I'm eating fine," she said, stepping back. "Just busy.""I'm sure you are." Victoria's eyes moved over her once, quick and practiced, the way she always checked a person over. "Come in, come in. I made up Helen's room as best I could."---Felix was outside in the car. Maya had told him to wait at the curb, visible, no pretense about it. Victoria hadn't said anything about it, which meant she'd clocked it and decided not to.The hallway smelled like it always had. lemon polish, something baking that wasn't quite finished yet. Maya followed Victoria toward the stairs."I still can't believe someone would do this." Victoria's hand went to her chest, light, automatic. "To Helen's things, of all things. I've barely slept.""Did the police say anything?"

"I Wondered When Someone Would Come"---"I wondered when someone would come," the old woman said, before anyone had introduced themselves. "I just didn't think it would take this long."Maya stopped in the doorway. Elias was a step behind her. Ciara hung back near the corridor, still pale from the café, still wrapped in the same cardigan she'd had on two days ago. Elias had given her a room down the hall from the guest wing and she hadn't argued about it.Eleanor Hadley sat by the window in a high-backed chair, a blanket over her knees despite the warmth of the room. Eighty-three, frail through the shoulders, but her eyes moved over each of them with a precision that belonged to someone much younger.She looked at Elias first. Studied his face for a long moment, longer than was comfortable, the kind of look that filled bone structure, not manners."You have his eyes.""Whose?""Elias. The first one. I was at his funeral." She looked at him properly now, top to bottom. "They named y

"He Was There" --- "He was there," Elias read again, staring at the message on Maya's phone. "I wasn't born when my father died. The message isn't about me." Maya looked at him. "Then who is it about?" He didn't answer. He handed the phone back and got into the car beside her without another word, and Felix pulled away from the gala without being told where to go, which meant he already understood enough not to ask. --- The city moved past the window. Elias sat very still, turning something over behind his eyes that Maya could see but not read. "Roland would have been what, a teenager? Twenties?" "Twenty-two." He said it immediately, like the number had been sitting ready. "I looked it up once, years ago. Out of curiosity. My uncle died the year my father turned twenty-two." "Old enough to be there." "Old enough to be anything." He went quiet again. Maya watched his jaw work twice like he was chewing on something before he let it become words. "Roland has spent

"As Family" --- "I made your favorite," Victoria said, setting a dish in front of Maya, the same recipe she'd made every birthday since Maya was seventeen. "I thought, with everything that's happened, you could use something familiar." Maya looked at the dish and thought: *you have no idea how unfamiliar everything has become.* "It looks wonderful," she said. "Thank you." --- The table was full. Victoria at the head, Richard beside her, withdrawn and silent in exactly the way Helen's letter had described — a man who signed what he was told and asked nothing, who now sat the same way, present in body and absent in everything else. Ciara across from Maya, visibly holding herself together. Elias beside Maya. And, in the chair Maya hadn't expected, Roland — introduced by Victoria as if it required no explanation at all. "I know it's unusual, having Roland here," Victoria said to the table, warm, gesturing with her wine glass. "But he's been so wonderful through this whole tr

"My Sister Trusted The Wrong People" --- "You look exactly like her," the woman said, before Maya had sat down. "I'm sorry. I know that's not what you need to hear first. I just...I didn't expect it to hit me like that." Maya sat down anyway. She looked at the woman across from her, sixties, composed, watchful, Helen's bone structure in the jaw and the set of the eyes. Whatever warmth might have been there once was buried under something longer and harder than Maya had words for yet. Felix was twenty feet away at a different bench, not looking at them. Elias was in the car at the park entrance. Close enough. "You broke into Roland's safe," Maya said. "I did." "You've had access for eleven years." "Yes." "Why?" "Because thirty-one years ago I put something in there that I needed to be able to retrieve when the time was right." Cass's hands were folded in her lap. Steady. "And the time is now right." "What did you put there?" "Documents. A recording. Things that Elias, your