Ivy didn't touch the envelope. "I'd rather not take money for something I don't understand."
"That's a very principled position for a woman who slept in her car two weeks ago." Damian's voice stayed pleasant, which somehow made it worse. "Take it anyway. Consider it a welcome gift. Understanding can come later."
He didn't wait for her to argue further, just stood, buttoning his jacket, the meeting deciding itself the same way it had in the sitting room her first day. "Dinner's at seven, if you'd like to join the family table tonight instead of the staff. Selene enjoys the company."
"I'll think about it."
"Do." He was already moving toward the door, the envelope left sitting on the desk between them like a test she hadn't passed or failed yet. "And Ms. Calloway… whatever my wife tells you tonight, over dinner or otherwise, I'd ask that you extend me the same discretion you've shown so far. Marriages are complicated. Outsiders rarely see the whole picture, no matter how much they think they do."
He left her alone in the study with the envelope and the low gold light through the windows, and Ivy sat there a moment, staring at it, before she stood and walked out without taking it.
She found Selene an hour later in the small sunroom off the west wing, alone, a cup of tea gone cold on the table beside her, staring out at the hedge maze like it held an answer she couldn't quite reach.
"Can I come in?"
Selene startled, quick, before her face smoothed back into its usual arrangement. "Of course." She gestured to the chair across from her, and Ivy took it, close enough now that she could see the fine lines of exhaustion under the woman's careful makeup, the kind of tiredness that didn't wash off with a good night's sleep.
"Your husband offered me money today," Ivy said. "For discretion. About something I overheard this morning."
Selene's hands went still around the teacup. "What did you overhear?"
"You know what I overheard. You were in the room." Ivy kept her voice gentle but didn't back down. "Custody. Doctors. A judge who'd believe whatever paperwork landed in front of him."
Selene's composure cracked then, just slightly, a tremor at the corner of her mouth before she caught it. "He likes to remind me what he's capable of. It's not a new conversation."
"Is it true? What he said… that he could make you look unfit?"
"With enough money, Ivy, a person can make anything look true." Selene's voice had gone thin, stripped of its usual careful warmth. "Doctors who'll sign whatever's put in front of them. A judge who owes him a favor from a donation nobody else remembers giving. I've watched him build cases like that before, against people who crossed him far less than I have."
"Then why stay?"
The question hung there, blunt, the kind of thing Ivy wouldn't have asked two days ago before she'd started learning how this house worked. Selene's eyes lifted to hers, something raw moving behind them.
"Because the moment I leave without proof, without something real, he wins twice over. He keeps Mia, and the story becomes that I was unstable all along, that I abandoned my own child rather than admit I couldn't handle motherhood." Selene's hands tightened around the cup. "I've spent two years trying to build something he can't undo with a phone call to the right judge. I'm close. I need… " She stopped herself, jaw working, some internal argument playing out behind her eyes.
"You need what?"
Selene studied her for a long moment, weighing something, and then set the teacup down with a soft, deliberate click. "Can I ask you something, and trust that you'll answer honestly?"
"Depends on the question."
"When you found Renee Ashford's husband hurting her… in the moment, before you picked up anything, before you acted… did you think about what would happen to you afterward? The consequences, the trial, any of it?"
Ivy's chest tightened, an old ache surfacing fast. "No. I didn't think about anything except making it stop."
"That's what I need to understand," Selene said quietly. "Whether that's the kind of thing a person can access again. Deliberately. Or whether it only happens once, in the moment, without warning."
The question sat wrong in Ivy's stomach, wrong in a way she couldn't immediately name. "Why does that matter to you?"
Selene didn't answer right away. Her eyes drifted back to the window, to the hedge maze beyond it where Mia had disappeared two days ago, running from something no one in this house would say out loud.
"Because I think," Selene said finally, so quiet Ivy had to lean in to catch it, "that a man like Damian only stops when someone finally decides the consequences don't matter anymore. And I think you're the only person who's walked through that door in two years who might actually understand what that costs."
Ivy sat very still, the words settling over her slow and cold, the shape of them finally clear enough to name.
"You're not asking whether I'd do it again," Ivy said. "You're asking whether I'd do it for you."
Selene didn't deny it. She reached instead into the folder she'd carried all afternoon, the one Ivy had watched her guard like something fragile, and slid it across the small table between them… photographs, Ivy realized, the edges worn soft from handling. A woman's arm, bruised in a pattern too deliberate to be accidental. A door frame splintered near the lock. A child's drawing, crayon, a house with a stick figure crying red tears in the corner.
"I've been documenting this for two years," Selene said, voice shaking now, all pretense finally gone. "Everything he's done, everything he's threatened. I have enough to bury him in a courtroom, Ivy, if I ever survive long enough to use it. But paperwork takes time, and every day it takes, Mia sleeps under his roof, and I don't know how many more days like that we actually have left."
She reached across the table and closed her hand over Ivy's, cold fingers, desperate in a way that made Ivy's skin crawl and her heart break in the very same instant.
"I'm not asking you to do anything tonight," Selene whispered. "I'm only asking you to understand, before this goes any further, that if it ever comes down to protecting that little girl the only way left to protect her… I need to know whether you're a woman who'll actually do what needs to be done, or whether five years in a cell taught you to hesitate the way it teaches everyone else.”