Agnes Thorne could see that she had Emmy now, defenseless, in her grip. She leaned forward. “I don’t know how you found out about the will, but I am telling you, I am finished with you. You go to the press with this and I will spend every penny I have making your life as miserable as you’ve made mine.”
“I didn’t . . . I never . . . I was sent a letter informing me that I had money coming to me,” Emmy finally sputtered.
“Liar.”
“I swear it’s true!”
“You lie!”
“I didn’t even know his name until I got this letter. I didn’t know anything!”
Agnes Thorne was at the ready to denounce Emmy when a voice broke through the heated exchange.
“She’s telling the truth, Mother.”
Emmy turned toward the sound of the voice. A young man, perhaps a little younger than she was, stood in the doorway. He was the boy in the portrait, grown up.
“Colin!” Agnes sputtered. “What did you do?”
The man came into the room. Emmy could see that he favored his mother in looks. But his eyes were not full of hatred and disgust.
“I did what I told you I was going to do when I turned eighteen. I told Mr. Bowker to find her. That money is hers. Dad left it to her.”
Agnes seemed to deflate before Emmy. Where a minute earlier there had been a fiery warrior, now there was a beggar woman. The change in her was that remarkable.
“Colin, how could you do such a thing?”
Emmy could feel the pain behind her words, the sense of betrayal.
“Because it was the right thing to do. You know it is.”
The man turned to Emmy and put out his hand. She shook it slowly and with little enthusiasm, she was still so astonished. “I’m Colin Thorne. Your half brother.”
Agnes winced and turned her face away, as though she could no longer bear the sight of Emmy in her house.
Emmy looked from one to the other, from the half brother she didn’t know she had who’d risked his mother’s wrath to see that she was paid in full, to the wronged woman who’d learned too late that her husband had been unfaithful to her. And then there was Emmy in the middle, the whore’s daughter. The ignorant child who couldn’t see where the good things her mother had had came from, or rather, who chose not to.
Emmeline.
The girl she used to be.
She reached into her handbag, and closed her fingers around the check that had been made out to Emmeline Downtree.
Emmy pulled it out, laid it on the table by her teacup, and stood.
She started to walk away from the man who wanted her compensated and the woman who wished she had never been born. It was several seconds before either one of them realized Emmy was leaving them and their money.
Colin came after her. “Wait, Miss Downtree! Wait.”
But Emmy did not wait.
“Miss Downtree!”
Her hand was at the door when Colin reached her. He had the envelope in his hand.
“It’s yours. He wanted you to have it.”
Emmy looked at the envelope. Such a thin little thing to have caused such grief today.
“But that’s not what I wanted,” she said.
And she left him standing there with the envelope in his hand, his fingers covering the word Emmeline scrawled across the front in Mr. Bowker’s practiced script.