Chapter 15 - The Dawn of Truth
The sun hung high in the sky as Clara walked back into the grand library. Julian was standing before Eleanor’s portrait, which had been moved that very morning from the seaside cottage to the centerpiece above the marble fireplace.
In the painting, Eleanor was young, her eyes bright and filled with the laughter of that long-lost summer by the sea.
"Do you hate me, Clara?" Julian asked quietly, his back turned to her. "For not looking harder? For believing the easy lie?"
Clara walked up beside him, folding her hands together. Her apron was gone, replaced by a simple woolen sweater. Her fingers still bore the faint scars of hard work, but her posture was no longer bowed.
"Mother spent twenty years teaching me how not to hate," Clara said, looking up at the painting. "She said hate was a fire that only burned the person holding it. She wanted me to know who my father was, not so I could take your money, but so I wouldn't spend the rest of my life feeling abandoned."
Julian looked down at his daughter, tears finally spilling over his weathered cheeks. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. "You will never be abandoned again, Clara. Everything I have, everything this name carries, is yours."
"I don't want the empire, Julian," Clara replied softly. "I want the school in mother's coastal town rebuilt. I want the debts of the families she lived beside cleared. And I want Blackwood Manor opened to the children who have nowhere else to go."
Julian smiled, the deep lines on his face softening with immense pride. "Then that is what the Vance family will do."
As they stood together beneath Eleanor’s portrait, the library telephone rang sharply.
Julian picked up the receiver, listening intently. Clara watched as his face suddenly drained of color once again, the newfound peace shattering in an instant.
"Julian? What is it?" Clara asked, her breath catching.
May you like
Julian slowly lowered the receiver, his knuckles white against the desk. He looked at Clara with wide, haunted eyes.
"That was the federal penitentiary," Julian said, his voice barely a whisper. "The transport van carrying Victoria never arrived. She was broken out twenty minutes ago... by men wearing the Vance family crest."
