Chapter 2 - The Paper Trail of Lies
The private dining salon was soundproof, lined with deep mahogany paneling, velvet drapes, and an antique fireplace that crackled with dry birch. As soon as the heavy double doors clicked shut behind us, isolating us from the curious eyes of Chicago’s elite, the temperature in the room plummeted.
Richard sat Noah down at the far end of the long walnut table, handing him a clean cloth napkin and a gold Montblanc pen from his inner pocket. “Draw me that dinosaur right here, Noah. Let the grown-ups talk for a moment.”
Noah nodded, entirely unbothered by the tension, his tongue poking slightly from the corner of his mouth as he began scribbling on the heavy linen.
Ethan stood near the fireplace, his back rigid. He had stripped off his suit jacket, tossing it over an armchair with uncharacteristic violence. He turned on his father.
“You’ve lost your mind,” Ethan said, his voice shaking with a fury he could barely contain. “You bring her here? To our table? After what she did to me? After she took half a million dollars from the family trust and vanished into thin air?”
I gasped, the air leaving my lungs as if I’d been struck. “What?”
Ethan spun toward me, his eyes blazing with seven years of accumulated hatred. “Don’t play innocent, Claire! Don’t stand there in your worn-out coat with your wide eyes! You took five hundred thousand dollars from an escrow account routed through the First Illinois Bank on October twelfth, seven years ago. The exact day you packed your bags and cleared out of the apartment!”
“Ethan, stop,” Richard commanded, his voice cold as winter ice.
“No, Father, I will not stop!” Ethan roared, slamming an open palm against the table. Noah jumped, the gold pen skittering across the cloth.
I moved instantly, putting my body between Ethan and my son. “Don’t you dare shout in front of him,” I hissed, my voice vibrating with a rage that matched his own. “You think I took five hundred thousand dollars? I gave birth to your son in a county clinic on a plastic mattress because I didn’t have health insurance! I washed dishes for ten dollars an hour with stitches still burning in my body! I pawned my mother’s wedding ring to buy formula because my milk dried up from the stress of being hunted by private investigators!”
Ethan went dead white. “Hunted? What are you talking about?”
“The men in dark sedans who sat outside my sister’s house in Peoria,” I spat, tears of pure venom finally breaking free. “The men who told my landlord I was a person of interest in a corporate fraud case so he’d evict me before Noah was three months old! I thought you sent them, Ethan! I thought you wanted me dead, or at least far enough away that your spotless Blackwood name wouldn’t be dirtied by a girl who grew up in a trailer park!”
“I never sent anyone!” Ethan yelled, stepping toward me, his hands shaking. “I spent eight months looking for you! I called every hospital in the state! I hired investigators to find you, but every lead went cold because there was a signed non-disclosure agreement in my office with your signature on it, Claire! Stating you had accepted a settlement to terminate all contact with me!”
The room went completely, terrifyingly silent.
Even the birch log in the hearth seemed to hold its crackle.
I stared at him, my mouth slightly open, watching the agony and confusion war across features I used to know better than my own face. He wasn't lying. I had known Ethan Blackwood since we were twenty-one years old; I knew the twitch of his jaw when he was being deceptive, the hollow tone his voice took when he was negotiating a ruthless merger.
He wasn't negotiating. He was bleeding.
“I never signed an agreement,” I whispered, the room spinning around me. “I left because… because Victoria came to the apartment.”
Ethan slowly turned his head toward Victoria.
Victoria was standing near the door, her hands clutching her small alligator-skin purse so tightly that the leather groaned under the pressure. Her face was the color of skim milk.
“Ethan, darling,” Victoria began, her voice climbing into a nervous, shrill register. “You can’t believe this fiction. She’s had seven years to rehearse this story. She knows your father has grown soft in his old age, she found an opportunity—”
“Shut up, Victoria,” Richard Blackwood said softly.
The old man reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a thick, legal-sized manila folder, dropping it heavily onto the center of the walnut table. The thud was absolute.
“Open it, Ethan,” Richard said.
Ethan didn't move for three agonizing seconds. Then, slowly, as if approaching an unexploded bomb, he stepped to the table and flipped the folder open.
Inside were eleven handwritten letters. The envelopes were yellowed at the edges, postmarked from Peoria, Springfield, and south Chicago. Some were written on lined notebook paper; others on cheap stationery from a diner.
Ethan picked up the first envelope. His hands were visibly trembling.
“These were never delivered to you,” Richard said, his gaze fixed on Victoria. “They were intercepted at the corporate mailroom under a priority rerouting order signed by Harold Hale. Your late father-in-law-to-be, Ethan.”
Ethan pulled a paper from the envelope. I recognized it instantly. It was the letter I wrote at three in the morning when I was six weeks pregnant, crying so hard the ink had smeared across the blue lines.
*Ethan, please answer your private phone. They told me you changed the number. I don’t want money. I just need to hear your voice. The doctor confirmed it yesterday. We are having a baby.*
Ethan’s knees seemed to give out slightly; he had to brace both palms against the table to keep from falling. His head hung low, his breathing coming in jagged, ragged gasps as he read line after line of my desperate, broken pleas from a past he had believed was filled with cold betrayal.
“There’s an ultrasound inside the third envelope,” I whispered, unable to look away from him. “Noah was the size of a kidney bean. I taped it to the back of the letter because I thought… I thought if you saw his little heartbeat, you would come find us.”
Ethan slowly lifted the black-and-white sonogram from the yellowed paper. His thumb brushed over the tiny, grainy smudge in the center of the image.
Then he looked at Victoria.
The look in his eyes was not anger. It was something infinitely worse. It was the look of a man who had realized that the foundation of his entire life for the past seven years was built upon a mass grave of lies.
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“Victoria,” Ethan said, his voice dropping to a terrifying, deadly whisper. “What did you do?”
***