Claire left the church through the side door before anyone could stop her.
She kicked off her heels halfway across the courtyard and found Daniel beside his car, one hand on the roof, breathing hard.
“Show me the envelope.”
He froze.
Claire held out her hand. “My father wrote your name like that. The long D. The underline. I know his handwriting.”
Daniel looked at her with something worse than guilt.
Fear.
“I received it three days ago.”
“From who?”
“There was no return address.”
Claire stepped closer. “My father is dead.”
“I know.”
“Then open it.”
“I already did.”
She slapped him.
The sound cracked through the courtyard.
Daniel did not move.
Claire immediately hated that she had done it, but the anger was too large to fit inside her body.
“You walked me to the altar knowing something was wrong?”
“I hoped it wasn’t real.”
“What wasn’t real?”
Daniel took the envelope from his pocket.
Inside was a single folded sheet.
Claire snatched it from him.
The first line made her knees weaken.
Daniel—if Claire ever agrees to marry you, there is something she must know before she becomes your wife.
The letter was dated two weeks before her father’s death.
Claire read the rest standing barefoot beside Daniel’s car.
Her father wrote that he had hidden evidence of a financial crime committed twenty years earlier. He wrote that one family had been destroyed to protect another.
And then came the sentence Daniel had not been able to ignore.
Claire’s mother knows the truth. Daniel’s father paid to keep it buried.
Claire looked up slowly.
Daniel’s father, Richard Mercer, stood at the church doors watching them.