“That’s right, miss.” Neil Madden leaned forward, and for the first time the tired, slightly awkward man in the rumpled suit looked entirely serious.
“Madam saved my life.
Even if it costs me that life someday, I’ll never betray the Sinclairs.”
He said it simply, as if it were a fact as plain as the weather.
More than forty years ago, Neil had been a homeless boy in Solmere City with no family and no name worth mentioning.
He survived by stealing whatever he could get his hands on: wallets, food, and anything left unattended on a windowsill.
One night he slipped into the garden of a wealthy family, hoping to lift something from their back porch.
Instead, through a half-open window, he saw them kill a man.
He panicked.
His foot knocked over a flowerpot, and it shattered on the flagstones.
They came after him.
He ran for his life through the dark streets of Solmere with men pounding behind him, and by sheer luck he scrambled over a wall and found himself hiding in the shrubbery of the Sinclair estate.
It was Margaret who found him there, a young widow even then, already running the family on her own.
She took one look at the filthy, shaking boy in her hedges, listened to his story, and made a decision.
She didn’t hand him over when the men came knocking.
She lied to their faces without blinking and hid him.
For two months, Neil lived in a back room of the Sinclair house.
When it was finally safe, Margaret sent him to Westhaven, far out west, with money for school and a letter to a friend who would look out for him.
He had never forgotten it.
For forty years, whenever he caught wind of anyone moving against the Sinclairs, a rival, a disgruntled partner, or a rumor in the wrong mouth, he had picked up the phone and called Margaret first.
“I’ve asked Neil to keep an eye on the Ashfords,” Margaret told Neve.
Then she turned to him.
“That’s all for now.
Go get started.”
Neil rose, nodded to Margaret, gave Neve a small, polite bow, and let himself out.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Neve waited until his footsteps had faded down the hall.
“Nana,” she said slowly, “I think we should keep some distance from him from now on.”
Margaret’s brows rose.
“Why?
Does he betray us?”
She was genuinely puzzled.
She had known Neil for four decades.
Loyal to a fault, sometimes foolishly so.
She couldn’t imagine it.
“He probably wouldn’t.” Neve hesitated.
“But his daughter might.”
Walter and Silas exchanged a glance.
“In my past life, he helped us a few times,” Neve went on.
“But he didn’t live very long.
He died before the apocalypse was even a year old.
And after that, his daughter, Nora, kept trying to kill me.
She always said I was the one who got her father killed.”
She frowned, reaching back through years of blurred, frightened memories.
“I never understood why.
I didn’t even know what had happened to him.
But every time she saw me, she attacked.
The last time, she killed two of our people.” Neve looked at Silas.
“And you killed her.”
Silas didn’t react.
He simply absorbed it.
“By then, Neil and Nora had both joined the Whitmores.
After Nora died, the Whitmores demanded compensation.
We ended up paying them two hundred crystal cores to settle it, and that was the end of that.”
She shook her head.
“Everyone makes their own choices.
I just don’t want anything more to do with that family.”
The truth was, the help Neil had given in her past life had mostly gone to other Sinclair people, not to her directly.
She had never even met him face to face.
She had only heard his name now and then, passed along by Declan or Callum.
She remembered Callum telling her once that a man named Neil Madden had sent word urging her to leave the Ashfords and come over to the Whitmores.
The Ashfords are only using her, he had said.
Tell her to get out while she still can.
She hadn’t listened, of course.
She hadn’t listened to anyone back then.
So perhaps Neil really wasn’t a bad man.
Perhaps he had seen what Neve refused to see.
But his daughter was a different matter.
Nora had been unreasonable, relentless, and impossible to talk to.
Whatever grief had driven her, she had turned it into a blade and pointed it straight at Neve.
It was better to leave that whole thread alone and keep well clear of it.
Honestly, if Nana hadn’t said the name Neil Madden out loud today, Neve wouldn’t have remembered him at all.
Too much time had passed, and they had never been close.
“Heh.” Silas let out a short, dry laugh from his place by the window.
“So in this version of events, I’m the man who killed his daughter.” He shrugged.
“Then yes.
Better keep our distance.
Good thing I didn’t say much to him just now.”
“Mm.” Margaret tapped a finger slowly on the desk.
“Then don’t tell him too much from here on.
And not just him.” Her expression darkened.
“We need to be careful with everyone who has a family outside this house.
I’ve been thinking only about whether our people can be trusted.
But what about their husbands and wives, their children, their parents?
What happens when the world ends and they have to choose?”
It was a sobering thought.
Even people who were loyal to the bone could be pulled in another direction by someone they loved.
From now on, she would be far more careful.
“So how did he die?” Margaret asked.
“In your past life.”
“I don’t know.” Neve spread her hands.
“I only heard that he died on a mission.
Something went wrong while he was out.
I never found out what, or why.”
She fell quiet for a moment.
“Nora always said it was my fault.
But she never told me how.
She’d just come at me screaming, and then she’d attack, and nobody ever got a real answer out of her.
And in the end, it all just ended the way it ended.”
She paused.
“The strange thing is, while he was alive, he kept trying to get me to go to the Whitmores.
He sent messages through Declan more than once.
I never paid any attention.” Neve looked down at her hands.
“I didn’t know him, and I didn’t know his daughter.
I didn’t think any of it had anything to do with me.”
Margaret said nothing for a long moment.
Then she reached over and squeezed her granddaughter’s hand.