His Brother's Ex, His Unborn Child

Chapter 21

NICHOLAS

Marcus Hale called on a Thursday evening.

I was at my desk when the phone rang. It's the private line, the one that didn't go through the Carter Group switchboard. I had been expecting the call for ten days. I had been dreading it for nine.

"I have preliminary findings," Marcus said. "Nothing complete yet. But enough that you should know which direction this is going."

"Tell me," I said.

"Location data first. The night in question, the lakehouse anniversary trip." I heard paper moving. "Liam's phone pinged a cell tower twelve miles from the property at nine forty-seven in the evening. The lakehouse property GPS coordinates place the vehicle in the driveway throughout the evening. Twelve miles doesn't fit."

I said nothing.

"Call records," Marcus continued. "Three calls to an unregistered number in the seventy-two hours before the lakehouse trip. Two calls the morning after. Nothing since." A pause. "The unregistered number has appeared in two other investigations I've run in the past four years. Different clients. Same number. It's a contact used for hire."

My heart started to race.

"Financial records," Marcus said. "A cash withdrawal of fourteen thousand dollars eleven days before the lakehouse trip. Another of eight thousand two weeks after. No corresponding deposits anywhere. No vendor payments. No personal expenditure that accounts for either amount."

I looked at my desk.

"That's the preliminary picture," Marcus said. "There's more coming. I need another week, possibly ten days, for the full report. Mr. Carter — whoever put this together was careful. But not careful enough."

"Thank you," I said. "Keep going."

I ended the call and set the phone down.

I sat at my desk in the quiet of the room with the floor-to-ceiling glass and thought about everything Marcus got so far.

I thought about a woman on a dark country road in the rain, what I had assumed about her, what I had done based on that assumption.

**

I went to see Aunt Dominique on Friday.

She was staying at the hotel on 62nd she always used when she was in the city. She's travelling again .She has been doing that since she lost Henri and the boy, the movement the only thing that seemed to work for her. She had called me two weeks ago from somewhere in Portugal.

I had told her I was busy and was looking into something and she had said I thought you might be and hadn't asked what.

She was in the hotel restaurant when I arrived. There was a coffee in front of her, reading something on her phone. She looked up when she saw me and set the phone down then waited.

Dominique Carter had known me for thirty-eight years. She had been at every significant moment of my life — the ones I had chosen and the ones that had chosen me.

She had been the person who told me my father was dying before anyone else had found the words. She had sat with me in the hospital in the last weeks and said what needed saying and not said what didn't.

She was the only person I trusted.

I sat across from her.

"Liam," I said.

She looked at me.

"What about your brother?"

"I've had someone looking into the lakehouse trip," I said. "Elena's anniversary. The night she was attacked."

Dominique was very still.

"The attack was arranged," I said. "Paid for. Coordinated from Liam's phone." I looked at my hands on the table. "Fourteen thousand dollars in cash eleven days before. An unregistered contact used for hire. His location twelve miles from the property at the time he claimed to be in the driveway."

The restaurant moved quietly around us. A waiter refilled a water glass at the next table. Someone laughed across the room.

"Nicholas," Dominique said.

"I know."

"How long have you suspected?"

"The suspicion came recently," I said. "The evidence is recent. But—" I stopped. "I should have looked sooner. I had reasons not to look that weren't actually reasons."

She studied me across the table. The particular way she looked at things she was trying to understand fully before she responded.

"The girl," she said. "Elena."

"Yes."

"You judged her? You weren't at their wedding."

"Yes, I judged her. And yes, I wasn't at their wedding."

"Harshly."

"Yes."

She was quiet for a moment. She picked up her coffee and set it down without drinking.

"And now?" she said.

I looked at the table.

"Now I know the evidence doesn't support the judgment," I said. "I reached a conclusion without data and I applied it every time I was in a room with her." I paused. "Every cold word. Every dismissal." I stopped again. "I treated her the way I treated her because I had decided what she was. I was wrong on all counts."

Dominique looked at me for a long moment.

"Does she know any of this?" she said.

"I don't think so. Not the full picture."

I thought about the quiet dignity I had seen at the family lunch. The smile that arrived correctly and reached nothing behind her eyes.

"She knows something is wrong. She's... she's not passive about it. But I don't think she has enough yet to know the full shape of it."

"And Liam?"

"Doesn't know I'm looking."

"Keep it that way," she said immediately. "Until you have everything. All of it. Don't move before you have all of it."

"I know."

She looked at me steadily. "And when you do?"

"Then I decide what to do with it," I said.

Dominique nodded slowly. She looked out the restaurant window at the street beyond.

"She came to the lunch last week," she said. "Margaret's."

"I know. I was there."

"I watched her." Dominique looked back at me. "She manages that room with a grace that costs her something. You can see it if you're paying attention and I was."

I said nothing.

"Whatever Liam is," Dominique said, "and whatever he's done, she is not what you thought she was." She held my gaze. "She never was, and I think somewhere you already know that."

I looked at the table.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

**

I drove home through the Friday evening traffic slowly.

I needed the time between Dominique's hotel and my apartment to sit with what Marcus had told me and what it meant and what came after it.

My brother had arranged for men to hurt his wife.

His pregnant wife.

The pregnancy that I had sat across from at a family dinner table and received with a word that landed correctly.

It meant nothing because Elena's face when the news was announced had been the face of a woman reading her husband and not liking what she read.

I had noticed that but ignored it at the time.

I had not done anything about it.

The traffic moved. I moved with it.

Elena was carrying a child that Liam had been trying to destroy.

The timeline.

I had been trying not to think about the timeline.

The lakehouse was three months ago. Elena was pregnant. I had done the math without wanting to. The timing lined up in a way that left no room for anything except the truth.

It had been three months since the night on a dark road when a woman had flagged down my car in the rain.

I sat at a red light and looked at the street and let the thought complete itself.

The light turned green.

I drove.

The thought stayed with me all the way home and sat with me in the elevator and followed me into the apartment. It was still there when I stood at the window and looked out.

I needed the full report before I decided anything. I needed everything Marcus could give me to be certain before I do anything else because moving without certainty was how I had ended up here — in a room with a conclusion that had no evidence under it and a woman I had treated accordingly.

I would not do that again.

But the timeline sat in my chest like something with weight.

And I already knew what the weight was.