The Pages That Stuck Together
Chapter 09 - The Pages That Stuck Together
The hidden pages separated with steam from a kettle and a great deal of patience. I photographed them before unfolding the delicate paper. Sophie sat at the opposite end of the table working on spelling words while I discovered the most intimate record Lydia had left.
There was no confession of wrongdoing. There were sketches of children, names of schools, and a letter addressed to Adrian. It described a plan to challenge the foundation's directors after finding inflated invoices and altered grant records.
Then came a paragraph about something much more personal.
“I kept the rehearsal center quiet because I wanted to build one place where children met me as Lydia, not as a Bellamy. I was afraid Dad would turn it into a publicity campaign, and I was unfair to him for assuming he couldn't change.”
I cried when I read it. Lydia had loved her father and been angry with him at the same time. Those feelings made her real again, more than any photograph of a ballerina suspended in midair.
Adrian came the next day. He read the letter in silence. Then he sat by our kitchen window staring at the laundromat sign across the street.
“She didn't trust me,” he said.
“She wanted to,” I replied. “That is why she wrote it.”
He took off his glasses. “I spent so much time telling her I knew what was best that she stopped coming to me.”
I didn't rush to absolve him. He'd been absent from parts of her life, and now he was beginning to understand the cost. But Lydia hadn't been perfect either, and grief didn't require us to assign all the blame to one person.
The final page contained a list of names. Among them was a woman called Eva Rios, noted as “the person to call if they close the school.”
Eva was a former foundation auditor. She'd moved to Philadelphia after challenging the Mercer Street acquisition. Rebecca located her and requested an interview.
Eva arrived with an archive of spreadsheets and meeting notes. She said Lydia had discovered the first suspicious entries and asked her to review them. Within days, Eva had been dismissed for alleged insubordination.
Then she showed us an email from a director to Celeste: “Lydia is preparing to speak with Adrian on Monday. We need this handled before the board meeting.”
Monday had been the day Lydia died.
May you like
I felt a terrible certainty trying to take hold of me. But Rebecca cautioned that the email did not establish what “handled” meant, and the crash investigation was separate.
Still, the timeline was now impossible to ignore. Someone had wanted Lydia silenced before she reached her father.
