The Heiress Wakes to a Second Chance novel · Chapter 13 of 24
Chapter 13: What Odette Knew
Iris did not sleep.
At six in the morning she walked into the kitchen and found Odette already at the table, in her robe, with her cane across her knees.
"You're up," Odette said.
"Grandma, how long have you known?"
Odette did not ask known what.
She looked at her granddaughter for a long moment, and then she put both hands on the table.
They were trembling.
"A year," she said. "Since last October."
Iris stood very still.
"Your father's lawyer retired and sent me his old files. In one of them was a bill from a private investigator. Your father had hired him, three weeks before he died."
"To investigate what?"
"Sylvia."
Odette got up slowly and went to the dresser.
From the bottom drawer she took a gray folder, thin and soft at the corners from being handled.
She laid it in front of Iris.
"I paid the same man to finish what your father started. He found what he could in four months."
Iris opened it.
There were two birth records, copied from a county office in Ohio.
A girl, born to Sylvia Codman, twenty-six years ago.
A boy, born to Sylvia Codman, twenty-nine years ago.
Both children had been given to a cousin of hers to raise.
Both had been renamed, the girl Pickman and the boy Prewitt.
Iris read the names twice, and her hands went cold.
"You knew," she said. "You knew, and you sat at my engagement dinner."
"I knew she had two children nobody had ever heard of," Odette said. "I did not know they were in this house, or in your bed."
"You should have told me."
"And you would have gone straight to Sylvia."
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