Catherine took one step backward.
The floorboards creaked beneath her slipper.
“I wrote no answers.”
Daniel felt the old familiar pressure in his chest, the sensation of standing above a deep shaft with no rail.
He had risked saying too much.
He had also passed the point where retreat would help him.
“Colonel Blackwood kept copies of both sides,” he said.
“One side came from your sister, and the other side pretended to come from you.”
She crossed to the trunk, knelt, and ran her fingers along the lower panel.
The seam was almost invisible beneath a strip of dark veneer.
Daniel had carved that seam himself, following instructions that made no sense until he saw the papers.
“Show me.”
He did not move.
“Open the door first.”
“If I do, you’ll leave.”
“Yes.”
“You cannot expect me to trust you.”
“You aren’t the one who’s locked in a bedroom with someone who can have him punished for refusing her.”
The words reached her with a force no raised voice could have carried.
For a moment she appeared to understand the difference between the danger she imagined and the danger he lived with.
She turned the key, opened the door two inches, and left it there.
Daniel used his foot to push it farther open.
Only then did he kneel beside the trunk.
He pressed the hidden wooden pin beneath the brass corner.
The false bottom rose without a sound.
Inside lay a packet tied with blue thread, a narrow account book, and an envelope addressed to a woman who had been dead for three years.
Catherine touched the envelope.
“Margaret,” she whispered.
Daniel watched the hallway beyond the open door.
A house bell rang somewhere below.
They both flinched.
The trouble had begun long before that night, but it was the first time Catherine had been forced to see its shape.
Chapter 2: The Carpenter and the House
Daniel Carter had been born on Blackwood land, in a cabin built by men whose names never appeared in the plantation ledgers.
His father had been a carpenter, and his mother had been a seamstress who knew how to make a child’s shirt survive three growing seasons.
Both had taught him to notice details.
A loose stair could make a stranger fall, but it could also tell you who had crossed the landing after midnight.
A nail driven at the wrong angle might cause a door to sag months later.
