Chapter 5 - OCTOBER 2019
Ethan finally told me the truth about his meeting with my father.
Or at least part of it.
Robert Mercer had asked him to convince me to sign the beneficiary waiver.
In return, he offered Ethan half a million dollars.
“You refused?”
“Yes.”
“Then why hide it?”
“Because I wanted to know why he was so desperate.”
Ethan had started investigating on his own.
That explained the trust request.
It didn’t explain everything.
Margaret arrived the next morning with an old file from October 2019.
That month mattered because my grandmother Eleanor had died seven weeks later.
Officially, she died after suffering a stroke.
Nothing had ever seemed suspicious.
Until now.
Margaret placed three documents on my hospital table.
The first was the amendment creating my future child’s trust.
The second required a forensic audit after the child’s birth.
The third was a sealed instruction.
It contained a single sentence.
“If the audit reveals unauthorized distributions, contact the estate investigator regarding my concerns from November 2019.”
I looked up.
“What concerns?”
Margaret’s mouth tightened.
“The file is missing.”
Someone had removed it from her firm’s archives after my grandmother died.
Only three people knew the archive existed.
Margaret.
My grandmother.
And my mother.
I remembered Mom standing at Grandma’s funeral.
She had cried harder than anyone.
She had also insisted on handling every box from Grandma’s house herself.
My nausea returned.
“Are you saying my mother hurt her?”
“No.”
Margaret was careful.
“I’m saying Eleanor believed money was disappearing before she died.”
That afternoon, Detective Ruiz called.
Police had searched my parents’ home.
They found financial documents.
They also found an empty prescription bottle registered to someone who had never lived there.
The medication matched the substance found in my blood.
I gripped the phone.
“Whose name was on the bottle?”
Ruiz hesitated.
“Eleanor Mercer.”
My grandmother had been dead for almost seven years.
May you like
Someone had kept her old prescription bottle all that time.
And somehow the medication had ended up inside me.
