Chapter 50

Chapter 50

Harper

I stared at the message for a long time before showing it to Damian.

Information suggesting it wasn’t an accident at all.

“Harper.” Damian read it over my shoulder, his expression tightening. “You don’t have to call tonight. You don’t have to do anything tonight.”

“I know.” But my thumb was already hovering over the number, some part of me unable to simply set this down after decades of half-truths finally starting to crack open. “I just want to know, Damian. I’ve spent my whole life not knowing the real shape of what happened to him. I don’t think I can go back to not knowing now.”

“Then call in the morning,” he said gently. “When you’ve slept, when you’re not running on adrenaline and shock. Whatever this reporter has waited this long to tell you, it can wait one more night.”

I set the phone down slowly, some reluctant part of me recognizing the wisdom in that, even as urgency clawed at my chest. “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

We sat together a while longer, the house settling into its usual late-night quiet around us, though nothing about the stillness felt as comfortable as it normally did. Eventually Damian guided me upstairs, checking on Lily and Grace first, both sleeping peacefully, entirely unaware of the storm that had rearranged their mother’s entire history in the span of a single evening.

Sleep came slowly and unevenly, fragments of dreams tangled with fragments of memory — my mother’s face whenever my father’s name came up, the careful way she’d always changed the subject, the bitterness she’d never fully explained but had clearly, I now understood, been carrying alone for over two decades.

I woke before dawn, Damian still asleep beside me, and made my way quietly downstairs to the kitchen, phone in hand, the reporter’s message glowing in the dim early light.

I called before I could talk myself out of it.

“Mrs. Blackwood.” The voice on the other end was calm, measured, a woman’s voice, older than I expected. “Thank you for calling. My name is Renata Cole. I’ve been investigating this story for almost a year.”

“You said my father’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“That’s what my sources suggest, yes.” A pause, careful and deliberate. “I want to be clear with you upfront — this isn’t confirmed. It’s a theory, supported by some fairly compelling evidence, but nothing a court would call conclusive yet.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Renata exhaled slowly. “Your father met with someone the night of the crash. A man named Victor Hale, an associate of Richard Blackwood’s from that same period. Phone records place a call between them less than an hour before the accident. Victor Hale died eight years ago, so we can’t ask him directly what that conversation was about. But your father’s business partner at the time — someone completely separate from Richard — told me your father called him in a panic that same night, saying he’d discovered something about the deal that ruined him. Something bigger than simple mismanagement.”

My hands had gone cold around the phone. “What kind of something?”

“That’s where the trail goes cold,” Renata admitted. “The partner passed away three years ago without elaborating further. But there’s enough here to suggest your father wasn’t just drunk and grieving that night. He may have been running from something. Or toward something. I haven’t been able to determine which.”

“And Victor Hale?”

“Officially, a heart attack. Unofficially, there were rumors at the time that troubled me enough to keep digging. I don’t have proof of anything beyond rumor there either.”

I sat in the quiet kitchen, morning light just beginning to creep pale and gray through the window, trying to absorb the shape of this new uncertainty layered over the truth I’d only learned hours earlier.

“Why are you telling me this instead of publishing it?”

“Because you deserve to decide how this story continues,” Renata said simply. “Thomas wanted this exposed as quickly and completely as possible. I understand his anger, but I don’t think grief should dictate journalism entirely. If there’s more to your father’s death than a drunk driving accident, I think that deserves careful investigation, not another rushed headline. But that’s your call to make, not mine.”

“What do you need from me?”

“Time, mostly. And perhaps access to whatever records your mother might still have. Old letters, financial documents, anything from that period that might help me trace what your father discovered before he died.”

I thought of the boxes still sitting untouched in my mother’s attic, things I’d never had the emotional strength to sort through even after everything. “I’ll talk to her. I can’t promise she’ll want to revisit any of this.”

“I understand completely,” Renata said. “Take whatever time you need. I’m not going anywhere, and neither is this story, whatever shape it eventually takes.”

We ended the call, and I sat there a long while, phone resting heavy in my palm, questions multiplying faster than I could organize them into anything resembling order.

Damian found me there twenty minutes later, still in the same chair, morning light now fully filling the kitchen around me.

“You called her,” he said, not quite a question.

“I did.”

“And?”

I told him everything, watching his expression shift through concern, confusion, and finally something steadier as he absorbed the full weight of what Renata had shared.

“Do you believe her?” he asked once I’d finished.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t know what to believe anymore, honestly. Yesterday I thought I understood my father’s death completely, even if the details were worse than I’d imagined. Now I don’t even know if what I learned last night was the whole truth, or just another incomplete piece.”

Damian knelt in front of me, taking both my hands in his. “Then we find out. Together, exactly like everything else. Whatever it takes, however long it takes.”

“Richard might know more,” I said slowly, the thought only now fully forming. “About Victor Hale. About whatever business dealings connected all of them back then.”

“I’ll talk to him today,” Damian said. “Gently. Carefully. If he’s hiding anything else, Harper, I promise you, we’ll find it. No more buried secrets in this family. Not after everything.”

I nodded, grateful beyond words for his steady presence despite the chaos still unfolding around us, though something uneasy continued sitting heavy in my chest, refusing to fully settle.

We spent the rest of the morning quietly, Lily and Grace both waking eventually, blissfully unaware of anything beyond their ordinary routines, and something about their unbothered normalcy helped ground me slightly amid everything still spinning uncertainly around us.

By early afternoon, Damian left to speak with Richard privately, leaving me alone with the children for a few hours, grateful for the distraction their needs provided against the questions still crowding urgently through my mind.

It was nearly four o’clock when my phone rang again, an unfamiliar number flashing across the screen once more.

I answered cautiously. “Hello?”

Silence stretched several long seconds before a voice finally spoke, rough and unfamiliar, carrying an edge of barely restrained urgency.

“Mrs. Blackwood, you need to stop asking questions about Victor Hale. For your own safety, and for your family’s. Some truths are better left buried, no matter how badly you think you need them.”

The line went dead before I could respond, leaving me standing frozen in my kitchen, phone still pressed against my ear, ice spreading slowly and completely through my chest.