As much as I suspected it secretly upset Henry that Violet was around so often, especially since he could never forgive her for what she’d done to Olivia, he understood that she and I shared a bond that no one else understood. I was the only person who fully comprehended what she’d had to do to keep her mother safe, and she was the only person who fully appreciated the lengths to which I’d gone to relieve her from the burden of delivering a soul every month. Violet grieved the loss of Trey much more severely than I ever would have expected she would, and keeping her—as Trey’s half sister—in my life was the only real connection to him I had. Sometimes she’d mutter something sarcastically under her breath, and she’d remind me so strongly of him that I’d break into tears.

Violet had been the one to call and tell me about Trey’s death the day after I’d returned to Tampa. Michael Simmons had left a considerable portion of his estate to Trey, with no strings attached. Of course, Trey wasn’t the one who told me this. Violet was. Mr. Simmons’s team of attorneys had briefed Mrs. Simmons about Trey’s paternity in advance of the reading, and Violet informed me that although her mother was aware by then that Trey was her late husband’s biological son, she’d had no idea about the threats that her late husband and his attorneys had made to Trey’s mom.

Violet had also told me shortly after Trey’s death—without a hint of regret—that she’d destroyed every bit of evidence she found on her dad’s laptop and in his home office about his request to his legal team to put pressure on Trey while at Northern to donate a kidney to Violet. Her father was already dead because of his selfishness and carelessness, Violet had reasoned. There was no need for her mother to also know that Michael Simmons had been a ruthless bully, willing to resort to murder under the right circumstances. The generous amount of money that he had designated for Trey made it clear that Michael Simmons had never had any real ill will toward his son; his motivation had always been to keep his paternity a secret from his wife. He must have decided when drafting his will that once he was dead, the secret wouldn’t matter anymore.

The amount of money Trey had inherited would have been presented to him in enormous lump sums upon his eighteenth, twenty-fifth, and thirty-fifth birthdays. He would have received a generous living allowance, renewed via direct deposit on a monthly basis. And any educational expenses that he submitted to the law firm for approval would have been covered by the trust, so he could have gone on to earn as many degrees as he wanted, paid for by Michael Simmons. However, Trey hadn’t stuck around to hear the details. He had politely thanked Lawrence Strohmann of Ekdahl, West & Strohmann for his time, and had walked out of the reading of the will before even reviewing the documentation that he was supposed to have signed to legally acknowledge that he was the recipient of the trust.