Chapter 9

She found him exactly where Elena said he'd be — alone in his penthouse, tie gone, sitting in the dark with a glass he hadn't finished, staring at the same skyline he'd looked at through this window a hundred times without ever once, Claire suspected, actually seeing it.

He looked up when she came in. Didn't ask how she'd gotten past security. Just watched her cross the room with an exhaustion that made him look, for the first time since she'd met him, entirely unarmored.

"I found the loans," she said. "Edmund's been buying my father's debt for nine years. Under his own firm's name, hidden three shells deep. He didn't save my father. He kept him on a leash."

Something flickered across Weston's face — not surprise. Confirmation of something he'd feared and never said out loud.

"I suspected," he admitted. "I couldn't prove it. Every time I got close, the trail went cold at exactly the point where it should have led somewhere. He's had thirty years to learn how to disappear a paper trail."

"There's something else." Claire's voice wavered despite every effort to hold it steady. "Someone's been texting me. Since the press conference. Feeding me pieces of this — the shell company, your father's history, tonight, the drive. I don't know who it is. But an hour ago, they told me to ask you about your mother."

The glass in Weston's hand went very still.

"My mother died when I was six," he said, too fast, too rehearsed — the answer of a man who'd given this exact sentence a thousand times and never once had to think about whether it was true.

"Weston."

"That's the answer, Claire. That's always been the answer."

"Then why do you look like I just asked you to lie to me again?"

He set the glass down. His hands, she noticed, weren't quite steady either — the first time she'd ever seen anything in him betray him without his permission.

"There's a version of the story my father told everyone," he said slowly, like each word cost him something physical to produce. "Car accident. Upstate. A closed casket because there wasn't enough left to show anyone. I was six. I believed it because there was no reason not to — because what six-year-old questions the story his father tells him about his own mother's death?"

"And the other version?"

"I found a letter when I was nineteen. In a box of my father's old files I wasn't supposed to have access to. It wasn't addressed to him. It was addressed to me — dated eleven years after the accident that was supposed to have killed her." His voice had gone somewhere flat and far away, the place people go when they're describing a wound so old it's stopped being an injury and become architecture. "She didn't die, Claire. She left. And my father decided it was easier to bury a woman than admit one had chosen to walk away from him — and from me."

"Did you ever try to find her?"

"Once. The trail went cold in less than a week. Whoever helped her disappear did it well." He looked up, and something in his expression had shifted into a kind of dread she hadn't seen from him before — not for himself, she realized. For her. "Claire, why is this relevant tonight. Why would whoever's been texting you bring up a woman who's been gone for twenty-eight years unless—"

He stopped. She watched the exact moment the thought finished assembling itself behind his eyes, watched the color drain slowly out of his face.

"Unless she's not gone," he said, barely above a whisper. "Unless someone's been protecting her identity for twenty-eight years the same way they've been quietly protecting your father's company. Someone who'd know exactly how Robert Cole operated. Someone who'd have every reason to want Edmund Harcourt exposed, and every reason to stay hidden while she did it."

Claire's phone buzzed in her hand. Both of them looked down at it at once.

"Unknown:" 'He's starting to remember. Good. Tell him I kept every letter he ever wrote looking for me. Tell him I read every single one.'

"Unknown:" 'Tell him I'm sorry it has to happen like this. There wasn't a version of this where it didn't hurt someone.'

Weston made a sound Claire had never heard from him before — something small and shattered, entirely unlike the composed, careful man she'd married under false pretenses two days ago. He reached for the phone with a hand that was shaking now, openly, no attempt left to hide it.

"That's not possible," he said. "Nobody knows about the letters. I never told anyone about the letters. Not Elena. Not Vivian. Not a single living—"

He stopped again. Went very still.

"Edmund," he said, and the name came out of him like something breaking. "Claire, Edmund knew. I told him. Years ago, when I still thought he was the only person in this industry who actually gave a damn about me. I told him about the letters."

The phone buzzed once more in Claire's hand, the final message glowing bright in the dark of the apartment neither of them could bring themselves to look away from.

"Unknown:" 'He's not wrong to be afraid of what Edmund knows. But he's wrong about who he's talking to. Look at your mother's maiden name, Weston. Look at whose name it became.