For several seconds, I could not move.
The private investigator’s office seemed to narrow around me, walls bending inward beneath the old fluorescent lights. Somewhere beyond the closed door, a phone rang twice and went unanswered. The air smelled of burnt coffee, printer ink, and dust—ordinary smells, careless smells—while the paper in my hand tried to pull the floor out from under my life.
If Rowan ever learns the truth, make sure he never finds out what happened to the third baby.
The third baby.
Not a phrase. Not a mistake. Not something my mind had invented because guilt had finally found a way to punish me.
There had been three.
I stared at the note until the letters blurred. My hand had gone numb around the edge of the paper. Across the desk, Gregory Voss—the man I had paid more than enough money to tell me the truth during my divorce—sat frozen in his chair, his skin gone the color of unpainted plaster.
“Explain it,” I said.
My voice sounded wrong. Too quiet. Too even.
Gregory swallowed. “Rowan—”
“No.” I lifted the note, my fingers shaking despite every effort to steady them. “You don’t get to say my name like we’re friends. You don’t get to soften this. You tell me what this means.”
He looked at the door, then the blinds, then the desk between us, as if help might come from the cheap furniture.
“I didn’t know everything,” he said.
“You knew enough.”
“I knew after.”
“After what?”
His silence told me more than his words could have. It was the silence of a man who had spent a year convincing himself that omission was not the same as guilt.
I leaned forward. “After what, Gregory?”
He closed his eyes. “After the divorce was finalized. Claire contacted me again. She said there were loose ends.”
The name struck something raw inside me.
Claire.
Three weeks from now, I had planned to stand in front of our family and friends and promise my life to her. I had let her choose flowers, approve invitations, smile across dinner tables beside my mother. I had let her sleep under my roof. I had let her touch the framed photographs my grandmother loved. I had brought her into the center of everything I once protected.
And Megan had been walking alone on the side of a road with my children strapped to her chest.
“What loose ends?” I asked.
Gregory rubbed both hands over his face. “I never met the babies. I didn’t even know there were three until later. Claire told me Megan was trying to contact you. She said Megan was unstable and might make false claims about a pregnancy.”
“A pregnancy?” I repeated.
He nodded once, miserably. “She wanted anything intercepted. Letters, emails, phone messages routed through office staff. She had help. I don’t know from who.”
“You don’t know,” I said, letting the words sit there.
“I suspected.”
“Then start with that.”
He reached into a locked drawer with trembling hands and removed a thin manila envelope. “I kept copies. I shouldn’t have. But after I realized the photos had been staged, I thought…” He stopped, ashamed. “I thought one day I might need protection.”
“You thought of protecting yourself.”
His eyes dropped.
I opened the envelope. Inside were printed emails, courier receipts, hospital discharge records, and a copy of a nondisclosure agreement bearing Megan’s signature.
