The air in the Foxworth Hall library smelled of old parchment and the cold, sharp scent of floor wax. Malcolm Foxworth sat behind his mahogany desk, his shadow stretching long across the Persian rug like a dark stain. He didn't look like a man who had just been blessed with a son; he looked like a man who had been insulted by a late delivery.
Outside the heavy leaded windows, the Virginia sky was bruising into a deep violet, but Malcolm’s eyes were fixed on a miniature portrait kept in a velvet-lined drawer. It was a woman with spun-gold hair and eyes the color of a summer lake. His mother. The woman who had walked out of these very doors when he was a boy, leaving him with a heart that had turned to flint.
"It is a boy, Malcolm," Olivia’s voice drifted from the doorway. She sounded tired, her voice thin and drained of the vitality it never truly possessed. She stood there, tall and austere, her frame as rigid as the corset she wore. She was the mistress of the house, a woman of impeccable breeding and cold efficiency, but she was not the woman in the portrait.
Malcolm didn't look up. "A boy. Another one."
"A healthy son," Olivia corrected, her jaw tightening. "To carry on the name. To inherit the estate. Is that not what a man of your stature requires?"
Malcolm finally raised his head. His eyes were like chips of blue ice. "A name is just a word, Olivia. I required a daughter. I required a Corrine."
The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the rhythmic ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. To Olivia, the name Corrine was a ghost that haunted the hallways of Foxworth Hall. It was the name of the woman who had birthed Malcolm and then discarded him, yet Malcolm spoke it as if it were a prayer. He didn't want a successor; he wanted a restoration. He wanted to reach back into time and pull his mother back into the world, to lock her in a room where she could never leave him again.
The weeks turned into months,...