Chapter 11 - The Daughter He Never Knew
Graham read the sentence until the words blurred.
“My daughter?”
Elise had never given birth. Not as far as he knew. Their marriage had ended in grief long before they could consider a family. He looked at Lucy, but she was staring at the photograph.
“Graham,” she said carefully, “there’s something else in the ledger.”
They went to Nina’s office, where the original pages had been scanned under controlled conditions. Nina brought up a record dated eleven years earlier.
A payment had been made to a private maternity clinic. The patient was listed under an alias. The child’s birth certificate had been sealed by court order.
Graham felt the room narrow.
Elise sat across from him, hands folded tightly.
“I was pregnant,” she said.
He stared at her.
“You never told me.”
“I found out two weeks before the accident. Victor discovered it. He said a child would give him another way to control us.”
“Where is she?”
Elise began to cry. “I gave birth in Vermont. I was told the baby had died.”
Graham stood so quickly his chair fell backward.
“No.”
“I believed them for years.”
“Who told you?”
“A nurse. A doctor. The clinic director.”
Lucy looked at the record. “The payments continued after the birth.”
Nina enlarged the document. A transfer had gone to a family placement agency in Ohio. Another had gone to a school trust. The name attached to the trust was unfamiliar.
Graham read the beneficiary line.
M. HART.
Lucy went pale.
“My father,” she whispered.
The room fell silent.
“My father never had a child,” Lucy said. “He and my mother tried for years. I was adopted.”
Graham looked from Lucy to Elise.
“No,” he said again, but this time it was not a denial. It was a plea.
Nina called for a DNA test. Lucy agreed, though her hands shook. Elise asked if she could hold Lucy’s hand. Lucy did not move away.
The results would take two days.
That night, Graham sat outside the lab while the samples were processed. His phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number.
May you like
You want your daughter? Stop the investigation.
Attached was a photograph of a little girl in a yellow raincoat, standing beside a school bus.
