Chapter 1 - THE MAN IN THE PORTRAIT
“Get on your knees, Lily. Dead fathers don't pay for dinner.”
Six-year-old Lily Sterling lowered her head and scrubbed harder. The silver glitter stuck to her aunt's shoe. Her fingers hurt. She had learned not to mention pain in front of guests.
Above the ballroom hung a fifteen-foot portrait of Marcus Sterling, draped in black ribbon. Below it, his mother Vivian raised a champagne glass. “To my beloved son,” she announced, as if the little girl working at her feet were invisible.
The front door opened. A rain-soaked man stepped inside, his coat hanging loose from a thinner frame. He had imagined this night a thousand times: Lily running into his arms, laughing because Daddy had finally come home.
Instead, he saw the brush, the apron, and the red streak across her knuckles.
“Put that down,” he said.
Music kept playing. Aunt Celeste turned and snapped, “The help enters through the back.”
Marcus walked beneath his own portrait. “I wasn't speaking to you.”
Someone dropped a champagne flute. The sound traveled through the room like a gunshot.
Vivian gripped the microphone. “Security. Remove that man.”
“Tell them who I am, Mother.”
Celeste's face drained of color. Lily looked up slowly. There were new scars at her father's temple, and he had lost weight. But his voice had found the same gentle place inside her that she remembered from bedtime.
“Daddy?”
Marcus knelt, keeping his hands where she could see them. “It's me, sweetheart.”
Lily took one uncertain step toward him, then stopped. Her eyes darted to Vivian.
“Don't,” she whispered. “Grandma said if I call you Daddy again, she'll send me to the blue room.”
May you like
The two security guards approaching Marcus heard every word.
