All Chapters of Anna and Jonathan: The Arranged Marriage : Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

JONATHAN'S POV Doctor Reyes answered on the first ring, her voice sharpening with concern the moment I explained why I was calling so late. I had rehearsed the explanation twice in my head before dialing, wanting to sound calm and rational rather than the barely controlled panic actually driving me, though I suspected the strain in my voice gave me away regardless of how carefully I chose my words. Some part of me had known, the moment Anna showed me that message, that this call could not possibly wait until morning. "I need to check something immediately," she said, and I heard her moving, a door closing somewhere on her end of the line. "Give me a few minutes." The minutes that followed stretched unbearably, Anna pacing the length of my study while I sat frozen at my desk, both of us unable to speak, unable to do anything except wait for a callback that felt like it took considerably longer than any reasonable few minutes should have. She called back within the hour, her v

JONATHAN'S POV I read the message three more times, as if repetition might change what it said. Congratulations on the good news, Mr. Clarkson. It's a shame it won't matter once everyone learns whose child you really buried three months ago. "That doesn't make sense," Anna said, her voice thin and fast, the words tripping over each other. "Lucas is buried. Everyone knows that. There's no secret there, there's nothing to learn" "Unless they're not talking about Lucas," I said quietly, and watched her go still beside me as the other possibility landed. Rose. Rose's funeral had been small, quiet, deliberately kept out of the press at my own family's insistence, a decision I had made at the time out of some tangled mixture of guilt and damage control that I hadn't examined too closely. Now it sat there in front of me looking like exactly the kind of thing someone could twist into a headline. "They're threatening to make it look like we hid something," I said, standing so abruptly th

JONATHAN'S POV "Dead how?" I asked, my voice tight, Marcus's answer already sitting like ice in my chest before he'd fully given it. "Car accident, two months ago, out on the coastal highway. It's public record, sir, I should have caught it sooner. Whoever's been sending these messages routed the number through an old account of hers that was never formally closed. Either they knew her well enough to have access to it, or they're better at this than anyone we've dealt with so far." "Find out which," I said, and ended the call before I could hear whatever careful, professional reassurance he'd been about to offer instead. Anna hadn't moved from beside me in the back of the car, but I felt the tension radiating off her, both of us staring out at the same dark stretch of road as if it might explain itself if we looked hard enough. "Someone planned this," she said quietly. "Not just the messages. All of it. Using a dead woman's identity isn't the kind of thing you stumble into." "No

JONATHAN'S POV The boardroom felt smaller than it had ever felt before, every seat filled by eight in the morning, faces I had known for years arranged around the table like pieces already placed on a board I hadn't realized was in play. Harold caught my eye as I walked in, a small, grim shake of his head that told me everything I needed to know before a single word had been spoken. Whatever ground we had hoped to hold overnight, we hadn't held it. "Thank you all for coming on short notice," I said, taking my seat at the head of the table, keeping my voice level through sheer force of will. "I understand there's been considerable conversation happening outside this room over the past two weeks. I'd like to hear it inside this room instead, starting now." Vance Whitmore, seated near the far end, folded his hands calmly in front of him, the picture of reasonable concern. "Jonathan, I want to be clear this isn't personal. I have enormous respect for what your family built. But the bo

ANNA'S POV Jonathan spent most of the following three days buried in oversight committee meetings, coming home late and exhausted, apologetic in a way that felt genuine even when it meant another night of dinner eaten alone at the kitchen counter with my laptop for company. I told myself I wasn't breaking my promise. I hadn't called anyone, hadn't hired an investigator, hadn't done anything he could reasonably call reckless. I was simply reading, the same as that first night, following the thread of a single law firm's name from one dry public record to the next, the way I used to trace provenance on a museum acquisition, patient and methodical, refusing to let a gap in the paper trail stop me before I understood what I was actually looking at. The firm, Halloway and Cross, had represented Diane on the wrongful termination suit Jonathan and I had already found together, but the deeper I dug, the more I realized how narrow a slice of her history that single filing actually represent