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.
Gregory nodded quickly.
“And don’t call Claire.”
“I won’t.”
I paused at the door. “If you warn anyone before I know where my children are, I will not threaten you. I’ll simply make sure the truth comes out with your name at the center of it.”
He looked at me then, fully. Not afraid of my money. Not afraid of my lawyers.
Afraid of the truth.
I walked out into the sunset with the envelope under my arm and a feeling I had not known for a year.
Not anger.
Not yet.
Grief.
It moved through me slowly, flooding every locked room inside me, touching all the places I had boarded up and called healed. I remembered Megan standing in our foyer while rain struck the tall windows behind her. Her dark hair had been loose around her shoulders. She had not packed. She had not defended herself with strategy or calculation. She had only held out her hands and begged me to look at her.
“Rowan, please. Someone is setting me up.”
And I, with all my education and power and supposed intelligence, had looked at the woman who knew my silences better than anyone alive and chosen the lie that hurt less than trust.
By the time I reached my car, my phone had buzzed eleven times.
Claire.
A string of messages lit the screen.
Where are you?
Dinner is at seven.
Your mother called about the seating chart.
Rowan, don’t be dramatic about Megan.
Call me.
The last message came with a laughing emoji.
