Dana kept copies. She said it was insurance. She is not the only one who knew.
Then a third message arrived.
Your mother tried to stop this before she died.
The room tilted.
I gripped the back of my chair.
“My mother?” My voice came out thin. “That’s impossible.”
Kenneth was already taking photos of the screen with his own phone for documentation. “We don’t know what it means yet.”
“My mother died years before the fertility treatments.”
“I know.”
“She never met Connor until after her diagnosis worsened. She never—” I stopped.
A memory surfaced so suddenly it stole my breath.
My mother, Elena Sinclair, sitting at our kitchen table in a pale blue scarf, her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she was too nauseated to drink. Connor standing near the sink, charming and attentive, calling her “Mrs. Sinclair” with exaggerated respect.
After he left that evening, my mother had looked at me for a long time.
“Men who perform kindness too loudly usually expect applause,” she had said.
I had laughed then, gently scolding her for being suspicious.
She had smiled, but not with her eyes.
“What is it?” Kenneth asked.
I swallowed. “She didn’t trust him.”
“Connor?”
“Yes. I thought it was because she was sick and protective.” I pressed my fingers to my lips. “What if it was something else?”
Kenneth’s expression grew thoughtful. “Did she leave any records? Journals? Letters? Anything from that time?”
“My father boxed most of her things after she died. Some are at his house. Some are in my storage unit.”
“Then we start there.”
I looked at the clock on the wall.
7:42 p.m.
My father would be home by now, probably in his recliner with a blanket over his knees, watching an old detective show and pretending he had not fallen asleep during the first ten minutes.
He had loved my mother with a gentleness that made love seem less like fire and more like shelter. After she died, he became quieter, not broken exactly, but rearranged. As if some essential furniture inside him had been moved and he kept bumping into the empty spaces.
“I need to see him,” I said.
Kenneth stood. “I’ll come with you.”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not yet. He deserves to hear this from me first.”
Kenneth hesitated, then nodded. “Take copies of nothing. Move nothing until we document where it is. But look. Listen. Ask carefully.”
“I’m a doctor, Kenneth. Not a detective.”
His voice softened. “Tonight, you are a daughter.”
That nearly broke me.
But I held myself together long enough to leave the hospital.
The drive to my father’s house took twenty-six minutes in good weather. In the rain, it took almost forty. Streetlights smeared across my windshield, and every red light seemed to last too long. I kept seeing Elliot’s face in the elevator doors. His damp lashes. His tiny hand around the giraffe. The way Melinda said he laughed like me.
Then my mother’s face appeared beside his in my mind, younger than I remembered her at the end, smiling as she tucked my hair behind my ear.
