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ever love each other.

But it was the first time a man had spoken to Rosalie without treating her like a joke or looking at her with pity.

She agreed to the marriage because she needed a way out of her father’s suffocating control.

Twelve years earlier, her mother, Lorelei, had died after falling from the veranda of the family’s lakeside home. Authorities had ruled the death an accident, but Rosalie had never accepted their explanation.

After Lorelei’s death, Emmett tightened his grip on his daughter. He paid doctors to keep her heavily medicated, isolated her from people who might help her, and circulated claims that she was mentally unstable.Anyone who questioned him was quickly pushed away.

The evening before her wedding, Rosalie discovered a small brass key concealed inside her mother’s old sewing box. She suspected it belonged to a locked archive that Emmett had guarded obsessively for years.