Chapter 6 - THE MISTRESS AS HOSTAGE
Khloe contacted Harrison from a borrowed phone the following evening.
She refused to say where she was.
Every sound in the background seemed to terrify her.
“Silas told me Evelyn killed her father,” she whispered.
“I believed him because he showed me police photographs.”
Harrison put the call on speaker with my permission.
“What changed your mind?” I asked.
“His mother brought a nurse to the house.”
“Why?”
“To tell me which doctor would deliver the baby, whether I liked it or not.”
Khloe was seven months pregnant when the court sentenced me.
Now she was nearing her due date, and Silas had begun insisting she sign documents granting him immediate medical and financial authority.
“He says the baby's trust will keep us safe,” she said.
“What trust?”
“The Clara Thorne Family Continuity Trust.”
The room seemed to contract around me.
Clara had no children with Silas, according to every official record.
“Don't sign anything,” I said.
“He said you would tell me that.”
A heavy door slammed on her end.
She inhaled sharply.
“He knows I called.”
The connection broke.
Ward launched an emergency welfare check, but the house was empty by the time officers arrived.
In the nursery they found packed suitcases, an untouched meal, and a medical wristband bearing a different name.
The name was Eleanor Bell.
Mara Bell's daughter had disappeared nine years earlier at age sixteen.
I had donated to the search fund without ever realizing whose daughter she was.
Ward told us Eleanor would now be twenty-five.
Khloe was twenty-six.
The resemblance in their old photographs was unsettling, though not conclusive.
Then Harrison uncovered Khloe's birth certificate.
Its file number had been reassigned after the original record was sealed.
Somebody had manufactured her history.
Had Silas chosen Khloe because she resembled Eleanor, or because she actually was Eleanor?
I wanted to believe she had merely been deceived.
But the nightmare was larger than an affair.
That night Ward found an audio message transmitted from Khloe's phone.
The background carried a low mechanical hum and the rhythmic ring of a crossing signal.
Khloe's voice was barely audible.
“Please tell Evelyn the baby isn't Silas's.”
Then a second voice entered the recording.
My mother-in-law spoke one sentence, so calmly it made my skin cold.
May you like
“Good girls don't remember what happened before we gave them new names.”
