Chapter 7 - The Woman Who Knew Too Much|
Vanessa agreed to meet me in a private consultation room away from Ethan's security detail.
She looked smaller without the dramatic entrance she had made in the emergency department. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and her fingers kept twisting the strap of her handbag.
“I should tell you everything,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Even if it makes you hate me?”
“Especially then.”
She explained that she had met Ethan at a charity auction. He had been polite, attentive, and unusually interested in her brother's medical debts. When she mentioned that she was struggling to pay them, he offered assistance through a private foundation.
Their relationship began several weeks later.
“He told me his marriage was broken,” she said. “He said you were living separate lives.”
“Were we?”
She looked down.
“Not according to what I saw in the photographs he showed me.”
“What photographs?”
She pulled out her phone and opened a folder.
There were pictures of Ethan leaving our home late at night, images of me walking alone outside the hospital, and photographs of me entering a clinic after my miscarriage.
Some were taken years apart.
The most disturbing showed me leaving a pharmacy with a prescription in my hand. The image had been enlarged until the pharmacy's sign was visible.
Someone had been following me long before Vanessa met Ethan.
“Who gave you these?”
“Victor Hale.”
“Why?”
“He said he needed me to understand that Ethan's marriage was already over.”
I studied the photographs.
“Did Ethan know Victor was giving you these?”
“I don't know.”
“Did you ever meet Richard Blackwood?”
Vanessa nodded slowly.
“Once. He came to my apartment and told me Ethan would eventually make me his wife. He said the family needed an heir, and you had already failed to give Ethan one.”
The words struck harder than I expected.
I had never blamed myself for the miscarriage, not consciously. But hearing that someone had turned my grief into a weapon made me feel physically ill.
“Did you believe him?”
“I wanted to.”
She began to cry again.
“I thought I was being chosen. I didn't realize I was being used.”
Before I could respond, the door opened and Marcus entered.
“Claire, we have a problem.”
He placed a printed email on the table.
It had been sent from a secure Blackwood account to a private medical laboratory. The message requested a paternity test using samples collected under false identities.
The subject line read:
CONFIRM THE HEIR BEFORE THE WIFE DISCOVERS THE TRUTH.
Vanessa covered her mouth.
Marcus looked at her.
“Do you recognize this sender?”
She nodded, trembling.
“It's Victor's old email address.”
“But Victor is supposedly dead,” I said.
Marcus's expression hardened.
“Then either someone has stolen his identity…”
May you like
He paused.
“Or the man we buried six months ago wasn't Victor Hale.”
