Fiona
Archie asked me to meet him at the mansion on a quiet Sunday evening, six months after everything had finally, carefully, begun to heal between us. My mother had returned to work weeks earlier, properly this time, no disguise, no borrowed name, simply herself, welcomed back into the household with a warmth and respect that still brought tears to her eyes whenever she talked about it.
I hadn't been back to the mansion often since everything happened, though the visits had grown steadily easier over the months as trust slowly rebuilt itself between Archie and me, patient and deliberate the way we'd both promised each other it needed to be. Still, walking through the front entrance that evening, something about the quality of the invitation felt different, more significant, though I c
