The parlor door opened, and the butler said, “Follow me.”

He led them back into the music room, where Grandma always saw him when he came. Never once had she invited her grandchild to so much as come upstairs. Despite the fairly early evening hour, she was already in a nightgown, around which she’d bundled a heavy quilted robe. Though her hair was mussed, she remained as haughty as ever. Of course she was angled so that the scarred side of her face was in shadow.

“The butler told me you did not seem crazed,” Grandma said, instead of hello. “But I should warn you that he is armed.”

“Great to see you, too.” Mateo gestured toward Nadia. “This is Nadia Caldani, my—friend.” He didn’t yet have the right to call her more than that. “Nadia, this is my grandmother. Grandma, Nadia has some questions only you can answer.”

“If you are here to ask if it’s safe to become romantically involved with a Cabot,” Grandma said to Nadia, “the answer is no.”

Nadia stepped closer. “What do you know about Elizabeth Pike?”

The question obviously caught Grandma off guard. “ … Elizabeth Pike? Good Lord. What do you need to know about her?”

“Everything you can remember,” Nadia insisted. She was the first person Mateo had ever seen who wasn’t intimidated by Grandma at all.

If Grandma hadn’t been so completely bewildered by the question, Mateo thought, she would have thrown them both out. Instead she sat there searching for what to say. “She was—fast, we used to say. The kind of young girl who went around throwing herself at men, including my husband. Not that there was anything improper between them. He told me that and … I still believe him, despite everything else. But the way she hung around him! It was shameless. And he was weak in the way most men are weak. A pretty young girl paying him attention—well. He never strayed, but he confided in her. Told her of his dreams, his thoughts, that sort of thing. No doubt it propped up his ego. Whatever can that matter now?”

“You’d be surprised,” Mateo said. His thoughts tangled together and buzzed in his head like a swarming hive. Elizabeth had used his grandfather the same way she’d used him.

Nadia nodded. “And how did Elizabeth know your daughter? Mateo’s mom?”

“Lauren took that girl on as if she were a little sister, or perhaps even a daughter.” Grandma said it automatically, without any curiosity about how someone she remembered as a teenager with Grandpa might still be a teenager years after his death. She doesn’t let us remember, Mateo thought with a chill. Elizabeth doesn’t let us recognize the evidence in front of our own eyes. “And Miss Pike was a bad influence. I’m convinced to this day that she was the one who told Lauren it wasn’t too late to have a child. Talked her into trying for a test-tube baby.”

Mateo could have reeled. It wasn’t that Grandma regretted his ever having been born; she’d already made that clear plenty of times. What killed him was that Elizabeth was the reason he’d been born. He was her … invention. Her possession, in more ways than he could ever have guessed.