Chapter 87: The Facility

**Shaznay's POV**

Victor told me about the security payments while I nursed baby Catherine in the upstairs bedroom. His words were clipped, precise, stripped of anything unnecessary; the way he spoke when his mind was racing ahead of his mouth.

"Evelyn is funding security for a facility that should be vacant. Ongoing payments. Current." He paced the length of the room. "She released my mother but continued paying the guards."

"Which means someone else is being held there."

"Or something is being stored there." Victor stopped pacing. "Jackson is researching the facility's ownership records. I want to visit it personally."

"Victor, the last time you visited an unfamiliar location on short notice, you walked into a warehouse trap."

"That was different."

"How?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it. I raised an eyebrow.

"Take Jackson. Take four guards. And call me the moment you step inside." I shifted Catherine to my other arm. "If Evelyn is hiding another person in that facility..."

"Then her crimes extend further than we imagined."

He left within the hour. I sat in the nursery with both babies; Catherine in her crib, Iris in the borrowed bassinet Clara had brought. Clara herself was in the guest room, resting, exhausted from seven months of solo motherhood in a flat without help.

Grace found me sitting between the two bassinets.

"Two babies in one room," Grace observed from the doorway. "You are collecting Emmanuel children like stamps."

"They collected themselves." I adjusted Iris's blanket. "Mom, sit with me."

Grace settled into the rocking chair. Her Bible rested on her lap, as it always did, but her eyes were on Iris.

"She looks like Victor."

"They both do." I leaned back against the wall. "Mom, how do you do it? Accept all of this? The constant revelations, the secrets surfacing, the ground shifting beneath our feet every single week?"

"Baby, I raised you alone for three years after Samuel's first hospitalization. I washed other people's clothes for a living. I ate one meal a day so you could eat two." Grace's voice was gentle but firm. "This family is complicated, wealthy, and dramatic. But the challenges here are not harder than the ones I already survived. They are just louder."

"Evelyn might be holding another person captive."

"Evelyn is an old woman whose power is crumbling. Whatever she hid, Victor will find it." Grace opened her Bible. "And when he does, you will face it together. The way you face everything."

"You sound like Daddy."

"Where do you think he learned it?" Grace smiled.

Victor called at four thirty. His voice on the phone was strange; not angry, not frightened. Hollow.

"Shaznay."

"What did you find?"

"The facility is a private nursing home. Small. Six rooms. Heavy security." He paused. "Five rooms were empty."

"And the sixth?"

"Occupied."

"By whom?"

Another pause. Longer this time. I could hear wind in the background, as though he was standing outside.

"Shaznay, I need you to prepare yourself for what I am about to say."

"Tell me."

"The sixth room contains a woman. Elderly. Severe dementia. She has been here for nine years." Victor's breath came through the phone in a controlled exhale. "Her medical chart identifies her as Margaret Okafor."

"Margaret?" I sat up straight, nearly jostling Iris's bassinet. "Daniel's widow? The ninety-three-year-old who came to our house with Okafor?"

"The woman who came to our house was not Margaret."

The room tilted. I gripped the phone harder.

"Then who was she?"

"I do not know. But the real Margaret has been here for nearly a decade, under Evelyn's care, paying Evelyn's guards, living in Evelyn's facility." Victor's voice hardened. "Someone impersonated Margaret Okafor in our sitting room. They brought letters they claimed were Daniel's. They told stories about Simon that shaped our decisions about the Foundation."

"The Foundation distribution," I whispered. "We gave nine properties to Okafor's family based on what Margaret told us."

"Properties that may have been distributed under false pretenses."

I pressed my free hand against my forehead. The walls of the nursery felt like they were contracting, squeezing the air from the room.

"Victor, if the Margaret who visited us was a fraud... then who orchestrated the impersonation? Okafor? Evelyn? Someone else?"

"That is what I intend to discover." His voice carried the flat, dangerous calm of a man whose patience had been tested beyond its limit. "I am bringing the real Margaret back to the mansion. She needs proper care, not this isolated box."

"Can she communicate? With the dementia?"

"The staff say she has lucid moments. Brief windows when she recognizes faces and speaks clearly." Victor paused. "During one of those windows, I showed her a photograph of the woman who visited our house. The woman who claimed to be her."

"And?"

"Margaret looked at the photograph and said one word. Just one." Victor's voice dropped. "She said, 'Evelyn.'"

I stared at the two babies sleeping in their bassinets. At the nursery walls Victor and I had painted together. At the small architectural model on the windowsill that I built for Catherine's first birthday.

Everything we constructed was built on a foundation riddled with lies. Every time we cleared one deception, another surfaced beneath it, like rot spreading through wood that appeared solid from the outside.

"Come home," I said into the phone. "Bring Margaret. Bring everything you found."

"I am on my way."

I ended the call and sat in the silence of the nursery, listening to my daughter breathe, and my husband's secret daughter breathe beside her, and I wondered how many more rooms in Evelyn's empire contained people we did not know about, living lives we could not imagine, trapped inside walls that the world believed were empty.