With Peter Shaw, Alice traces payments, separated mothers, and the names a powerful family worked to suppress. As the schoolroom and its archive face destruction, preserving the journal demands choices that will reach into her daughter's life. In the present, Clara North and Edward Vale confront the omissions that still protect the estate - and the silences within their own alliance.
Stuart Porter writes Gothic historical mysteries about damaged art, coastal estates, and family records designed to outlast the people who suppressed them. The Vesperwick Archives follows restorers and investigators opening the manor's sealed rooms one artifact at a time.