Chapter 7 - A Family Built on Lies
Darlene did not sleep.
She spent the night in Thomas's old study, surrounded by ledgers that had once seemed ordinary.
At dawn, Blake found her beside a locked cabinet.
“I know you're furious with me,” she said.
“I'm furious with people who used my daughter.”
“Then help me establish the truth.”
Darlene placed the photograph on the desk.
Blake stared at Sarah's baby wearing the familiar hospital band.
“Why was your husband holding Abigail?”
“I don't know.”
He had spent years guarding the fragile story of his family.
Sarah loved him.
Abigail was his daughter.
They had been poor and frightened, but they had belonged to one another.
He would not let a photograph dismantle that bond.
“The note says grandfather,” he said.
“Yes.”
“That doesn't make it true.”
“Nothing in this house is true until we prove it.”
Naomi's investigators found an archive of payments from a Stanley family trust to Sarah Reed.
The transfers began eighteen months before Abigail's birth.
The descriptions read CONSULTING SERVICES.
Sarah had never mentioned the money.
Blake checked their old bank records.
The payments had gone to an account in her maiden name, not the account they shared.
For the first time, he understood that Sarah had been keeping secrets of her own.
He wanted to feel betrayed.
Instead, he remembered how she flinched whenever an unfamiliar car slowed outside their apartment.
Darlene found a letter in Thomas's handwriting addressed to a physician.
It requested the creation of a “longitudinal observation account” for a minor child.
No treatment was to occur without proper consent, the letter insisted.
Naomi pointed to a handwritten change beneath the paragraph.
A second pen had added words authorizing broad discretionary interventions.
“The ink looks different,” Blake said.
“We'll have the original examined,” Naomi replied.
Darlene read the signature at the bottom.
Thomas Stanley.
“Why would Thomas be concerned about this child?” she asked.
Blake answered with the question neither wanted to say aloud.
“Was Sarah related to him?”
Before they could pursue it, the hospital called.
A man presenting himself as Abigail's maternal uncle had attempted to obtain her discharge instructions.
He used Sarah's maiden name and knew her date of birth.
Security turned him away.
Then the man left a message at reception.
“Tell Blake to ask Darlene what happened to the other baby.”
Darlene closed her eyes.
There had been another baby once.
Her own son.
May you like
And she'd been told he died before she could hold him.
