Part 2
For several seconds, I could not move.
The private investigator’s office seemed to narrow around me, walls bending inward beneath the old fluorescent lights. Somewhere beyond the closed door, a phone rang twice and went unanswered. The air smelled of burnt coffee, printer ink, and dust—ordinary smells, careless smells—while the paper in my hand tried to pull the floor out from under my life.
If Rowan ever learns the truth, make sure he never finds out what happened to the third baby.
The third baby.
Not a phrase. Not a mistake. Not something my mind had invented because guilt had finally found a way to punish me.
There had been three.
I stared at the note until the letters blurred. My hand had gone numb around the edge of the paper. Across the desk, Gregory Voss—the man I had paid more than enough money to tell me the truth during my divorce—sat frozen in his chair, his skin gone the color of unpainted plaster.
“Explain it,” I said.
My voice sounded wrong. Too quiet. Too even.
Gregory swallowed. “Rowan—”
“No.” I lifted the note, my fingers shaking despite every effort to steady them. “You don’t get to say my name like we’re friends. You don’t get to soften this. You tell me what this means.”
He looked at the door, then the blinds, then the desk between us, as if help might come from the cheap furniture.
“I didn’t know everything,” he said.
“You knew enough.”
“I knew after.”
“After what?”
His silence told me more than his words could have. It was the silence of a man who had spent a year convincing himself that omission was not the same as guilt.
I leaned forward. “After what, Gregory?”
He closed his eyes. “After the divorce was finalized. Claire contacted me again. She said there were loose ends.”
The name struck something raw inside me.
Claire.
Three weeks from now, I had planned to stand in front of our family and friends and promise my life to her. I had let her choose flowers, approve invitations, smile across dinner tables beside my mother. I had let her sleep under my roof. I had let her touch the framed photographs my grandmother loved. I had brought her into the center of everything I once protected.
And Megan had been walking alone on the side of a road with my children strapped to her chest.
“What loose ends?” I asked.
Gregory rubbed both hands over his face. “I never met the babies. I didn’t even know there were three until later. Claire told me Megan was trying to contact you. She said Megan was unstable and might make false claims about a pregnancy.”
“A pregnancy?” I repeated.
He nodded once, miserably. “She wanted anything intercepted. Letters, emails, phone messages routed through office staff. She had help. I don’t know from who.”
“You don’t know,” I said, letting the words sit there.
“I suspected.”
“Then start with that.”
He reached into a locked drawer with trembling hands and removed a thin manila envelope. “I kept copies. I shouldn’t have. But after I realized the photos had been staged, I thought…” He stopped, ashamed. “I thought one day I might need protection.”
“You thought of protecting yourself.”
His eyes dropped.
I opened the envelope. Inside were printed emails, courier receipts, hospital discharge records, and a copy of a nondisclosure agreement bearing Megan’s signature.
Not Megan Bellamy.
Megan Bellamy Ward.
My chest tightened. She had taken back her mother’s maiden name.
I forced myself to read.
The hospital listed was outside Nashville. Delivery date: seven months and nine days after I had thrown her out of our home.
Triplets.
Two discharged under Megan’s care after extended observation.
The third transferred.
Transferred.
Not deceased. Not listed as lost. Transferred.
My breath caught so sharply it hurt.
“Where?” I demanded.
Gregory shook his head. “That’s where the trail ends. There was a sealed medical transfer to a neonatal facility, but the destination was redacted. I tried—”
“You tried?”
“I got scared.”
I looked up slowly.
He flinched before I moved.
“Scared of whom?”
Gregory glanced down at the papers. “Claire wasn’t acting alone.”
The room settled into a deeper silence.
Outside the window, the last light of day stretched long and gold across the parking lot. Cars passed in the distance, ordinary people going home to ordinary evenings, unaware that mine had been split open.
“Who helped her?” I asked.
“I don’t have a name. But there were calls from your corporate legal office around the same time. Not official filings. Private calls.”
My first instinct was to reject it. My company was my pride, my inheritance, my work. Bellamy Holdings had been built by my grandfather and saved from collapse by my father. I had spent fifteen years turning it into something stronger. My offices were filled with people whose children I knew by name, people who had stood beside me through recessions, acquisitions, courtroom battles, and grief.
But I had already been wrong about too much.
“Give me everything,” I said.
Gregory pushed the envelope toward me. “There’s one more thing.”
I waited.
“The note was not written by Claire.”
I looked down at it. “How do you know?”
“Claire rarely wrote anything by hand. When she did, it was sharp, neat. This is older handwriting. Formal. See the capital R? The way the T crosses low?”
I stared at the note.
A memory surfaced so suddenly I almost stepped back from it.
Birthday cards with heavy cream envelopes.
Thank-you notes left on silver trays after charity dinners.
A single sentence written across the top of a speech draft years ago: Too sentimental. Cut half.
My mother.
No.
The thought arrived and I rejected it in the same heartbeat.
Evelyn Bellamy had never loved Megan. That was no secret. She had considered Megan too quiet, too stubborn, too unwilling to be molded into the sort of wife suitable for a man who carried our last name. But dislike was one thing. This was something else. This was a blade slipped between ribs while everyone smiled over dinner.
“No,” I whispered.
Gregory did not speak.
I folded the note carefully and placed it in my jacket pocket. The old me—the man who had believed himself rational because he was always decisive—would have stormed home, confronted Claire, called lawyers, burned every bridge at once.
That man had already destroyed enough.
“Don’t leave town,” I said.
