Thia nodded. “I’ve thought of her over the years, wondering if she were still alive and if she ever found happiness.” Her voice was thick with remembered fondness. “How is she?”
“Life has left her a bit fragile, but she’s managed to cope. She told me she lived here once.”
“When I was a girl, yes.”
“And she left abruptly. Do you know why?”
“My father drove her away.” She paused, staring into her glass. “No, that’s not true. He sent her away. She and my brother were going to be married when he came home, and then . . .”
“The telegram came.”
“That he’d gone missing, yes. They found his ambulance all shot up. There was blood everywhere, but no body. Just his jacket in the road with a bullet hole through it. Someone—a farmer, I think—saw the Nazis marching him into the woods. It wasn’t unusual for them to shoot someone and drag their body into the woods to bury. Sometimes they just left them for the animals. My father didn’t tell me about any of it until Anson was safely in Switzerland.”
“But no one ever told Soline your brother was alive.”
“No, he’d sent her away by then. I was shuffled off to boarding school a few days after the first telegram and was still there when the second arrived. Conveniently out of the way.”
“Because he never meant for them to be married. Not from the minute she set foot in this house.”
Thia’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to be in possession of a lot of information, Miss Grant. What, may I ask, is your connection to Ms. Roussel?”
“I’m a friend,” Rory replied, hoping it was still true. “And I lease a building from her for a gallery I’m opening next month. That’s how we met. I found some things of hers when I took possession and offered to meet her to return them. One of the items belonged to your brother, a shaving kit with his initials on it.”
Thia closed her eyes briefly, lower lip quivering. “She kept it all these years.”
“You remember it, then.”
Thia nodded. “My father took it from her. He didn’t want her to have anything of my brother’s when she left—and certainly not anything with his initials on it. I thought it was terribly mean of him, so I snuck into his room and found it, then slipped it into her box when she went down for breakfast.”
“It was you,” Rory said, smiling. No wonder Soline had adored her. “She assumed it was your father. She thought he might have been sorry about the way he’d treated her.”
Thia’s mouth thinned. “My father didn’t believe in guilt, Miss Grant. Or love. To him, they were signs of weakness.”
“Do you know why he sent Soline away?” Rory asked quietly. “The real reason?”
Thia stared into her lemonade. “I didn’t then. But I know now.” She glanced up, sighing. “I know a lot of things now. I suspect you do too.”
“The baby, you mean.”
“Yes. The baby.”
“Her name was Assia,” Rory said softly, remembering that the child would have been Thia’s niece. “It means ‘comforter.’ Soline wanted so much to have a piece of your brother to hold on to, to keep his memory alive through their daughter. When she died . . .”
Thia set down her glass and clasped her hands tightly in her lap. “There are pieces of the story you don’t know, Ms. Grant. Pieces no one knows except me. And even I didn’t know them until recently. Soline’s baby didn’t die.”
Rory stared at her, confused, then horrified. “What are you saying?”
“I assumed you knew and that was why you were here.”
Rory shook her head, struggling to digest what she’d just been told. “How could I know? How is it even possible?”
“My father paid people to lie,” Thia replied evenly. “To say the baby died so Soline could never come back and make a claim on my brother. He didn’t care what happened to either of them when he thought Anson was dead. He just wanted them off his hands. But when that second telegram arrived, he knew Anson could never know about the child. He had to be sure there was no chance of her ever turning up with a baby in her arms. So he wrote a nice fat check—to arrange for a discreet adoption. Then he wrote to Anson in Switzerland, saying Soline had run out on him, that she had refused to tie herself to a cripple. He needed my brother to hate her so completely that he’d never even think about looking for her.”