Chapter 8 - CELESTE’S VERSION OF LOVE
Celeste requested to speak with me through attorneys.
Rachel advised against any private meeting.
A prosecutor approved a recorded interview with counsel present because Celeste claimed she could explain the planned travel and Amelia’s message.
She arrived wearing a plain navy dress instead of the elegance she once used as armor.
“I loved you,” she said.
“Where were you taking Sophie?”
“To Lisbon.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why lock her in a suitcase?”
“She was screaming, and Richard panicked.”
“Sophie says you closed it.”
Celeste looked down.
“I needed five minutes.”
“You could have killed her.”
“The case was not airtight.”
“That is your defense?”
She began crying.
I felt nothing I trusted.
Celeste said Richard convinced her the corporate investigation would destroy us all. He claimed I would be arrested for approving false invoices. He said Sophie’s trust would be frozen and the press would blame Amelia.
“What trust?”
Celeste stopped.
Rachel noticed.
“You prepared travel documents referencing a trust,” she said. “Which one?”
Celeste refused to answer.
She claimed the affair with Richard began only after Amelia died.
Phone records suggested intimate messages before the crash but did not prove physical contact.
She said Amelia became paranoid during the final months of her life.
“Did you tell her that?”
“I tried to help.”
“Did you draft documents questioning her capacity?”
Celeste’s attorney intervened.
The answer remained hidden.
When I asked about the photograph, Celeste said Amelia enjoyed puzzles and dramatized ordinary disputes.
“Then why did you try to take it?”
“Because Sophie was using it to resist me.”
The cruelty of the explanation lay in its honesty.
Celeste had treated my daughter’s attachment to her mother as disobedience.
She offered one final claim.
“Richard caused everything.”
“Did he force you to forge my consent?”
“No.”
“Did he force you to close the suitcase?”
Silence.
“Did he force you to schedule a guardianship petition?”
“No.”
“Then he did not cause everything.”
The meeting ended.
Outside, Audrey—Amelia’s younger sister—waited beside Nora. She had flown in after learning about the reopened crash.
Audrey never trusted Celeste.
I remembered dismissing her warnings as grief competition.
“She moved into Amelia’s place too quickly,” Audrey said.
“So did I.”
“You were lonely.”
“That does not make Sophie less harmed.”
Audrey accepted the admission without comforting me.
She gave Officer Grant a package Amelia mailed one week before the crash.
Audrey had never opened it.
The envelope said:
ONLY IF ETHAN BEGINS DEFENDING CELESTE.
Audrey had hidden it because opening the package felt like accusing me during grief.
Inside was a small metal key and a card bearing the logo of a railway-station luggage service.
Locker 143.
The key number matched the photograph code.
The locker had been closed for nonpayment and its contents transferred to lost-property storage.
Records showed someone claimed the items six months earlier.
May you like
The claimant used Amelia Carter’s identification.
The woman on camera was Celeste.
