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The weight of what he’s said presses down on me, but a broken, panicked sound from Emily pulls me out of myself. She’s unraveling faster than I can process any of this.

“I’m so sorry, Lila,” she sobs. “So, so sorry.”

I find it within myself to stand and walk over to her. “What happened Em?” I feel desperate for answers now.

Baryn moves immediately, one hand on her arm, the other at her back, muttering her name and a string of no’s like he can physically hold the truth inside her if he just says it enough times.

“Emily,” he says, urgent. “You don’t have to⁠—”

Her shoulders fold inward, but her words pour out like vomit she’s held it in too long and it’s all coming up at once.

“Yes.” Tears run down her face in endless streams. “I do.”

She looks at me, really looks at me, bracing for impact.

“She was looking for it,” Emily says. “Victoria. The orrery. Sixteen million dollars’ worth of brass and myth and obsession. She was convinced Henry hid it somewhere on the estate.”

Baryn’s hand tightens at her elbow. “Emily⁠—”

“I don’t care anymore, Bear,” she snaps.

Her breathing falters. She presses her hands to her face, drags them down. Her cheeks are wet and red.

“She thought if she could find it, she could finally get what she deserved for marrying my father. He never wanted anything to do with our family’s money, and it made her batshit crazy.”

My stomach twists.

“I found everything several months after we moved out of the house and in with Grandmother,” Emily continues. “In my mother’s old room. Notes. Books. Printouts. About orreries. Poisons. She was obsessed. There was never even a hint of any of it while Dad was on trial. I don’t think she expected us—or anyone—to go back there, especially after so much time had passed. She’d become careless, leaving things out in the open.

But one day, Baryn and I were wandering the tunnels the way we used to as kids. When we passed the one that opens into the basement of my old house, it was hard not to go in. Walk around. Reminisce.”

She pauses to sniffle. “That’s how we figured it out. What she’d done. We suspected it, anyway.”

Baryn closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose.

“For a long time, I didn’t know how to move forward,” Emily says. “I had pieces that pointed to what we thought actually happened, but nothing concrete. Nothing solid enough to act on. Everyone knew she was always researching, digging, obsessing. Everything we found could just as easily be dismissed as that.”

Her hands curl into fists at her sides.

“It wasn’t until I went back through the reports from my grandfather’s murder that I had more to go on. The coroner noted signs of early stage heart failure, but Henry’s heart was fine. He had just had a checkup. So I dug deeper. Cross-referenced everything. That’s when I realized a supplemental toxicology report was listed in the evidence log, but it wasn’t in the case file. It had been removed,” she pauses, then continues. “I paid to have it tracked down through the lab’s internal database. The report flagged trace amounts of hellebore in his system. It wasn’t just early stage heart failure. He had been poisoned."

She looks at me like she needs me to understand—not just the crime, but the ache behind it.

“I told myself it was different,” she continues. “That I was just trying to get her to confess. My father was already dead, but I needed to fix things. And Baryn didn’t know. Not until it was already happening. Not until it was too late.”

She looks up at me again, completely wrecked.

“She realized eventually what was happening—that I was doing the same thing to her that she did to my grandfather. She was in a half-stupefied state when she confessed, more out of sheer irritation with me than anything else. Hellebore doesn’t make you tell the truth—it just strips the brakes off. It lowers inhibition, causes confusion. What she used didn’t work the way she expected. The tonic she’d been mixing into his tea hadn’t loosened his lips the way she’d hoped,” she whispers. “He didn’t give up any of the secrets she was so desperate to find. And eventually, he grew suspicious. He just… got angry. He knew something was wrong. She had been hounding him in his study one day when he grabbed her. And she⁠—”

Emily chokes, a sob tearing loose.

“She strangled him,” she chokes out. “He was already so weakened by the hellebore she’d been giving him that there wasn’t much left in him to defend himself.”

Baryn pulls her into his chest now, one hand cradling the back of her head. “That’s enough,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to say anything else. I think they can fill in the blanks.”

“Yes, I do,” Emily says into his jacket, voice muffled but relentless. “I never meant for anyone to die. I just wanted the truth. I just wanted my dad back. I wanted things to go back to the way they were. I wanted her to pay for what she’d done. I just needed her to admit it.”

She swipes at her face.