“Ah.” I let this sink in. “But surely Hendrik did the math too?”
“He couldn’t have been sure, though. Markus and I had been seeing each other beforehand, so for all Hendrik knew, we might have been sleeping together then. And he never saw Nina as a baby.”
For a second, my sense of injustice overwhelms my caution. “But it was none of Hendrik’s business anyway! Nina was Markus’s daughter—okay, not in the biological sense, but in every other sense.” It takes all my effort not to glare across at the door. “Why couldn’t Hendrik just accept you and Nina as part of his family?”
Leonora gives me a tired look, as if I’m missing the point. “He’d have accepted us if we’d all moved to the States, like he wanted, I’m sure. It wasn’t about acceptance. He just . . . He always suspected my motives for staying in this house. If he found out for sure that Nina wasn’t Markus’s daughter, I was afraid he might . . .”
“What?” I stare at her. “Oh. You thought it would destroy Nina’s chances of inheriting the house—is that what you mean?”
She presses her lips together and turns away. I’ve clearly stumbled into dangerous territory. Frantically, I try to pull the conversation back.
“So, when Stephanie told you Hendrik was coming . . .”
She relaxes slightly and sighs. “We guessed then, he wanted to sell the house, to force us to follow him to the States. But we thought if we could just show him how much Nina needed to stay here . . . Except to do that, we needed him to believe she was his granddaughter. And we couldn’t change the way she looked, of course. But Markus had this crazy idea that we could get her intensive music lessons, take advantage of Hendrik’s weak spot, because Anneliese used to play the cello. Markus said he’d ask a client of his, a violinist . . .”
I sit up straighter. “Caroline?”
“Exactly.” Leonora pulls a face. “But of course, Caroline said Markus was being ridiculous. Nina had no hope of learning enough in three weeks to impress anyone. Caroline told him her own niece had been playing the violin for seven years, and she was still constantly learning and improving . . .”
I swallow hard. That was me.
Leonora gazes through the window, lost in her memories now. “But apparently, during this conversation, Caroline mentioned she was trying to adopt her niece. And when Markus got home, he said she’d shown him a photo. And he said, ‘It’s a shame Nina doesn’t look more like Caroline’s niece.’ He said, ‘She’s plump and blond and round-faced, just like my mum’s side of the family.’”
I can hardly breathe. “So you thought . . .”
“Well, that’s when we decided to invite you here. It was only meant to be for a week or so. Enough time to trick Hendrik into believing you were Nina, and then you’d go back.” Briefly, she meets my gaze, and her expression grows earnest. “But we liked having you here, Beth. Nina liked you. And Markus always wanted her to have a brother or sister—he was the one who suggested you stay until Caroline was ready for you . . .”
“And Caroline never was ready for me,” I say faintly.
“No.” She turns back to the window. “No, Caroline turned out to have been playing a game of her own.”
I stare at her, and it takes me a moment to respond. “What do you mean?”
But she’s lost in her thoughts now. As the silence stretches, my hope stretches with it, like a strand of toffee about to snap. Then, when she finally begins to talk again, her words come quickly, referring to me in the third person, as if she’s forgotten I’m right here next to her. I wonder if the shock of last night has finally caught up with her—and then I forget everything else as I’m drawn into her story.
“Markus said he’d never noticed anything odd about Beth until he got back from his diving trip. But then he saw something, when he was getting his suitcases out of the car. ‘She looked just like my mother,’ he said. Not that he told me at the time.” She frowns. “No, he kept it quiet. Until Caroline came for her Christmas visit.”
I think back to that last visit of Caroline’s—the stilted conversation in the drawing room; Markus suggesting we walk around the lake but leave Leonora at home; Markus suggesting that Nina and I take the rowing boat out for what might be the last time before the lake froze over. Markus and Caroline strolling away along the lake path, then, just the two of them . . .
“I watched from the window,” Leonora says. “They went all the way around, past the tree stump, out of sight. And when they came back, Caroline looked angry. She left immediately, but—” Her voice turns bitter. “Markus was in a great mood. He wanted to tell the girls the news straightaway, he said, but luckily, I made him tell me first, and then I begged him to wait . . .”
I lean closer. “Tell the girls what news?”
She doesn’t seem to hear me. “And then he wanted to buy them matching bracelets . . .”
“What news, Leonora? What was it?”
“Caroline wasn’t his client.” She spits out the word. “She was his ex-girlfriend. I’d seen her years earlier, from a distance, but she wasn’t a hard-faced journalist back then. She was all long hair and denim shorts and orange crop top . . . She used to call herself Kat.”
Something stirs in my memory, like sludge shifting at the bottom of the lake. My brother, Ricky, calling our rarely seen aunt Caroline “Aunty Kat.” As if he’d once had a closer relationship with her, before I came on the scene.
Leonora’s voice drops. “He said he made Caroline tell him the truth, on that walk around the lake. That after they broke up, she found out she was pregnant. She was going to get rid of the baby. But her sister persuaded her . . .”
“No,” I whisper.
“Because her sister’s son had cystic fibrosis, and she was desperate for another child, but she was scared of it having the same condition . . . So the sister took on Kat’s baby.”
I shake my head. “No!”
“Markus said it made Nina and Beth practically sisters.” She screws up her face in anger. “But that wasn’t true! And everything I’d ever planned—”
I stumble to my feet, and Leonora’s attention snaps back to the present. She looks horrified for a moment, and then she glares at me accusingly.
“Get out!” She, too, springs to her feet, her voice rising to a shriek. “What are you doing in here? Get out of my house!”
I run from her. But I can’t run from the truth.
I’m Markus and Caroline’s daughter.