Chapter 2
Nathan read the page again before he handed it to me.
It was a letter from his father, dated four months before he died.
I had spent years hearing the man’s voice in my head. Seeing his handwriting brought it back so clearly that I nearly dropped the paper.
Nathan steadied it for me.
His father admitted that he had learned about my pregnancy before Nathan did. He wrote that he had kept my letters and instructed staff to turn away my calls.
Then he tried to excuse it.
He claimed he had been protecting Nathan from “an obligation that would destroy a necessary marriage.”
I looked up.
“Victoria?”
Nathan nodded slowly. “Our engagement put her family’s money into the company. We started discussing it after my father got sick.”
His father had planned it years earlier. The letter named Victoria’s father, Charles Vale, and described an agreement to combine their businesses.
Near the bottom was a sentence about Lily.
I read it twice.
They knew when she was born.
I remembered holding my newborn daughter in a hospital room, certain I had finally escaped them. Nathan’s father had known her name and birthday the whole time.
Lily leaned against me, tired from crying. I turned the page before she could see my face.
The second sheet listed payments made to a private investigator and a firm called Northbridge Services. I recognized one date. It was the week a stranger had photographed us outside Lily’s preschool.
I had told myself I was being paranoid.
I wasn’t.
A knock came at the door.
Two officers entered. One introduced herself as Detective Ramirez. The other stood beside her while she explained the allegation: Lily had supposedly been removed from the custody of a woman named Ellen Brooks, and I was suspected of planning to leave the country with her.
“I don’t know Ellen Brooks,” I said.
Ramirez asked to see Lily’s birth certificate and my custody records. Daniel showed her copies he had requested from my apartment. Lily had lived with me since birth. No one else had ever had custody.
Ramirez studied the pages.
“Who made the report?” Nathan asked.
“I can’t give you that yet.”
He held up his father’s letter. “Then you need to know someone has been watching them.”
Daniel stopped him before he could hand over the original. He gave Ramirez a copy and asked her to preserve the report and the material submitted with it.
The detective read enough to understand why.
“I won’t remove a child on the strength of this complaint,” she said. “But I do need to examine the documents.”
After she left, I expected to feel relief. Instead, Lily started crying again.
“Are they taking me away?”
“No.” I sat beside her on the bed. “You’re coming home with me.”
“Victoria said I couldn’t.”
Nathan knelt in front of her.
“Victoria was wrong.”
Lily watched him carefully. “Do you live in her house?”
“I live there now,” he said. “But I won’t ask you to go back.”
That was the first promise he made to her. He kept his voice steady, though I could see what it cost him.
Daniel found a small hotel where we could stay that night. Nathan arranged for a security guard at the entrance, after asking me if I was comfortable with it. I said yes.
On the drive, Lily fell asleep against my good shoulder. Nathan rode in front. He kept turning to check on her, then catching himself.
At the hotel, he carried our bag upstairs while I carried Lily.
“I’ll stay somewhere else,” he told me at the door. “Daniel’s nearby. Call if you need anything.”
I nodded.
He hesitated. “May I see her tomorrow?”
I looked at my daughter. Her hand was curled around the collar of my coat.
“Yes. But we go slowly.”
“However slowly she needs.”
After Lily was asleep, I read the rest of his father’s letter. It did not say why he had written it, only that Daniel should deliver it if the truth surfaced. It mentioned other records in his office safe, though Nathan had never seen them.
I called Nathan.
“There’s a safe,” I said.
“I know. Daniel’s getting the access records in the morning.”
“And if Victoria knows what’s inside?”
There was a pause.
“I’ve changed the house codes. No one enters that office without Daniel.”
He sounded certain. I wished I could be.
At six the next morning, someone knocked hard on our door.
I checked the peephole. Nathan stood outside, still wearing yesterday’s shirt.
When I opened it, he held up his phone. A photograph showed his father’s office. The safe door stood open, and papers lay across the desk.
“The alarm went off an hour ago,” he said.
“Was it Victoria?”
“They haven’t found her.”
Lily stirred in the bedroom behind me.
May you like
Nathan lowered his voice.
“Daniel had the first letter. Whatever was left in that safe is gone.”
