Chapter 2
Maybe herself.
Maybe our daughter.
“Rebecca knew all this?”
“Some.”
“Call her.”
Michael shook his head.
“You call her.”
“She won’t answer me.”
“Then perhaps you need to stop calling like Daniel Carter.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means don’t ask where Claire is.”
I stared at him.
“Ask why Claire was afraid to tell you the truth.”
The following morning, Rebecca answered after six rings.
“What?”
No hello.
No patience.
“Rebecca.”
“If this is about Claire’s location—”
“It isn’t.”
Silence.
“I found the letter.”
Another silence.
Longer this time.
“The nursery?”
“Yes.”
Her breath changed.
“Then she wanted you to know.”
“Apparently everyone knows what Claire wanted except me.”
“That might be because you stopped asking her.”
I closed my eyes.
I deserved that one too.
“Rebecca, I’m not calling to argue.”
“Good.”
“I need to understand Lakeview Holdings.”
She didn’t respond.
“And Carter & Bell.”
The line became completely quiet.
“Rebecca?”
“I told her not to put that in the letter.”
“Why?”
“Because she wasn’t sure.”
“Sure about Anthony?”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Turn uncertainty into an accusation.”
I almost laughed.
Claire had apparently taught her sister how to speak to me.
Or maybe they had always spoken this way and I had never listened long enough to notice.
“What do you know?”
Rebecca sighed.
“Enough to know Claire wasn’t imagining things.”
“Did she confront Anthony?”
“No.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because we were accountants and architects trying to understand a corporate structure built by people who’ve spent twenty years making it complicated.”
Claire was an architect.
That detail struck me differently now.
She understood plans.
Structures.
Where weight was carried.
Where something would fail if one support was removed.
“She found something else,” Rebecca said.
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just said—”
“She didn’t tell me.”
That caught me off guard.
“You were working together.”
“Yes. Until about three weeks before she left.”
“What happened?”
“She stopped sending me files.”
“Why?”
“She said she needed to confirm something herself.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“You expect me to believe she didn’t tell you?”
“I expect you to believe your wife was capable of having private thoughts.”
I rubbed my forehead.
“What did she say exactly?”
Rebecca was quiet for a moment.
Then she answered more softly.
“She said, ‘If I’m right, Daniel is going to think this is about money. It isn’t.’”
My hand lowered.
“What was it about?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“Did she mention Anthony?”
“No.”
“Michael?”
“No.”
“Anyone?”
“Yes.”
I waited.
“Your father.”
I stood so quickly the chair moved behind me.
“My father is dead.”
“I know.”
“He died eleven years ago.”
“I know that too.”
“Then what did she mean?”
“I don’t know, Daniel.”
For the first time, Rebecca sounded frightened—not of me, but of the uncertainty.
“She found an old file. Something from before you married Claire.”
“What file?”
“She never showed me.”
“Where is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Rebecca.”
“I don’t know.”
Her voice cracked slightly.
Then she steadied it.
“But two days before she left, Claire came to my apartment.”
My heartbeat slowed.
“She gave me a sealed envelope.”
“For what?”
“For the baby.”
I stopped breathing for a moment.
“What was inside?”
“I didn’t open it.”
“Where is it now?”
“Safe.”
“What did she say?”
Rebecca hesitated.
“She said if you ever found the letter in the nursery, I should give you the envelope.”
I stared across my empty study.
“When?”
“Not yet.”
Anger rose automatically.
Then I heard Claire’s words in my head.
Sometimes people hide things because they are afraid of what you will do with the truth.
I forced myself to speak calmly.
“What has to happen first?”
Rebecca exhaled.
“You have to answer one question.”
“What question?”
“When Claire comes home—if she comes home—are you trying to rebuild your marriage?”
I swallowed.
“Yes.”
“Or are you trying to rebuild your control over it?”
I looked toward the nursery.
At the rocking chair.
At my mother’s photograph.
At the letter waiting on the desk.
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted.
It may have been the first honest answer I had given anyone in months.
Rebecca became quiet.
Then she said, “That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes me think there might still be hope.”
The call ended.
That afternoon, I went to my office downtown and asked finance for every record connected to Lakeview Holdings.
I did not accuse Anthony.
I did not summon anyone.
I did not raise my voice.
Instead, I sat alone with documents until midnight.
Claire had marked several unusual transactions on the files stored on Michael’s flash drive.
At 11:43, I found one she had circled twice.
A monthly consulting payment.
Not large.
Not remarkable.
Paid to a company called North Star Advisory.
The registered address belonged to an old building in Oak Park.
I recognized it immediately.
My father had lived there during the final two years of his life.
But that was not the detail that made my pulse change.
The first payment to North Star had been made six months after his death.
And someone had continued collecting money in his name for more than a decade.
I turned the page.
Claire had written one sentence beside the account number.
Daniel believes his father left him nothing.
Then beneath it, in smaller handwriting:
I don’t think that’s true.
That alone would have surprised everyone who worked for me.
For years, I had rarely gone anywhere alone.
Not because I feared Chicago, but because people had gradually built a life around me that made solitude inconvenient. Drivers. Assistants. Security. People opening doors before I reached them.
Claire used to tease me about it.
“One day,” she had said while we were dating, “you’re going to forget how to buy your own coffee.”
“I know how to buy coffee.”
“You send someone downstairs.”
“That’s efficiency.”
“That’s helplessness wearing an expensive suit.”
I had laughed.
Standing outside my father’s old apartment building, I remembered the conversation and wished I could tell her she had been right.
The building was smaller than I remembered.
Three stories of faded brick, narrow windows, and iron balconies facing a quiet residential street. My father had rented unit 3B after losing his house.
I had visited twice.
Both times reluctantly.
Our relationship had never recovered from my childhood.
By the time he finally tried to explain himself, I had built a career around not needing explanations.
A woman in her seventies answered the front door.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for information about someone who lived here years ago. Thomas Carter.”
Her expression changed.
“You’re Daniel.”
I stared at her.
“How do you know that?”
She smiled faintly.
“You look exactly like him when you’re suspicious.”
That was not an answer I enjoyed.
“My name is Evelyn Ross.”
She opened the door wider.
“I owned the building when your father lived here.”
“Do you still?”
“My son does. I still live downstairs because retirement is mostly other people insisting you should stop doing things you enjoy.”
Despite myself, I almost smiled.
Her apartment smelled like coffee and cinnamon.
Photographs covered one wall. Children. Grandchildren. Christmas dinners. Graduations.
A life displayed openly.
Nothing in my home looked like that.
Evelyn poured coffee before I could refuse.
“Your father talked about you constantly.”
“I doubt that.”
“I expected you to.”
She sat across from me.
“He was proud of you.”
“He had an unusual way of showing it.”
“Yes.”
The answer surprised me.
Most people defended the dead.
Evelyn did not.
“He regretted quite a lot,” she said.
“That doesn’t undo it.”
“No.”
Again, no argument.
“Why am I here, Mrs. Ross?”
“Evelyn.”
“Why am I here, Evelyn?”
She studied my face.
“Because your wife came here.”
My fingers tightened around the cup.
“When?”
“About a month ago.”
Before Claire left.
“What did she want?”
“The same thing you want.”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“That may be why she found answers sooner.”
Claire would have liked Evelyn.
Possibly too much.
“What did my father leave?”
Evelyn’s smile disappeared.
“So you found that part.”
“North Star Advisory.”
She nodded slowly.
“You should speak to Anthony.”
There it was again.
Anthony.
“What does my cousin have to do with my father?”
“More than you know.”
“Tell me.”
“I promised your wife I wouldn’t.”
My patience thinned.
Then I remembered Rebecca.
Michael.
Claire.
Every person who had apparently spent months anticipating exactly how I would react.
So I tried something unfamiliar.
I asked instead of ordered.
“Why did she ask you not to tell me?”
Evelyn looked surprised.
“She said you needed to hear it from someone you still trusted.”
“I trust very few people.”
“She knew.”
“Did she tell you where she was going?”
“No.”
The disappointment must have shown because Evelyn’s face softened.
“She talked about you with great affection, Daniel.”
I looked at her.
“She left me.”
“Both things can be true.”
I stared into my coffee.
“She said you had become difficult to reach even when you were standing beside her.”
That sentence settled heavily.
“She also said she believed you could become reachable again.”
May you like
I almost asked whether Claire had actually used those words.
But I didn’t.
