CHAPTER FOURThe File
916 Words
Bianca had told herself she was only going to look.
That was the lie she'd been repeating for three days, ever since the engagement announcement had gone out and something in her chest had cracked open in a way she hadn't expected and didn't want to examine too closely. Just a look. Just enough to know, for her own peace of mind, exactly what kind of nothing Julian Cross had become. Then she could stop thinking about him. Then this ugly, useless feeling could finally close up and heal over, the way it should have healed over a year ago.
She had a friend from university who worked in medical records administration, the kind of low-level access job that came with more curiosity than judgment attached to it, and it had taken exactly one dinner, one bottle of wine, and one carefully worded question about "just wanting to understand what he's going through, for closure" to get what she wanted. A single PDF, forwarded from a personal email account that would delete itself from existence the moment Bianca closed the message. A neurological consult, dated four months ago. Recent. Far more recent than an accident that had supposedly happened over a year earlier.
She read it twice before she understood what she was looking at.
Patient presents with full cognitive function, no evidence of neurological impairment consistent with prior reported injury. Motor function intact. Recommend continued discretion per patient request.
Per patient request.
Not a diagnosis. A request. Julian Cross had asked a doctor to help him pretend to be someone he wasn't, and the doctor, for reasons Bianca couldn't begin to guess at, had agreed.
She sat very still at her desk for a long time, the laptop's glow the only light in the room, and felt the ground under her rearrange itself into a shape she didn't recognize. He wasn't broken. He had never been broken. Somewhere in that house, behind that door Marcus Reyes guarded like a man protecting something with actual teeth, Julian Cross was wide awake, and had been the entire time, and had let the whole world, including her, believe otherwise.
Her first feeling, embarrassingly, was hope, hot and immediate and stupid. He's not gone. There's still a version of this where.
Her second feeling arrived close behind it and drowned the first one out completely: fear.
Because a man didn't fake his own incapacitation, didn't build an entire elaborate lie around it, didn't station armed security around a house full of curtains that couldn't be trusted to hang straight, for no reason. Whatever Julian was hiding from was real enough that he'd rather be pitied as a vegetable than found as himself. And anyone who got close to him, anyone who married into that house and that lie, wasn't just marrying a fortune.
She was marrying whatever he was running from.
Bianca thought about her stepsister, currently touring the Cross estate, currently being fitted for a wedding dress she probably didn't even want, and felt something twist in her stomach that she refused to name as guilt.
It's not my problem, she told herself. I didn't build this lie. I just found it.
She thought about walking into her mother's study that night and laying the whole thing out. He's not incapacitated. It's fake. Ivy's about to marry into something dangerous, and we should stop it. She actually got as far as standing outside the door, hand raised to knock, before she stopped.
Because what happened next, if she told the truth? Ivy would be pulled out of the marriage. The Cross family, embarrassed and exposed, might quietly make the whole engagement disappear rather than risk the story getting out, and Bianca, along with anyone who knew, would become a loose thread in whatever violent, expensive secret Julian Cross was protecting. She had read enough about the kind of money that required armed security in a private residence to know that loose threads in stories like that didn't get treated gently.
There was also, underneath all of it, a colder, more practical thought she was ashamed of and couldn't quite suppress: if Ivy married him and it turned out fine, the Cross fortune, the Cross name, all of it would belong to her stepsister. Not Bianca.
Unless Bianca found her own path to security first. Fast. Before anyone had time to ask why she was hesitating.
She lowered her hand from the door and walked away from her mother's study without knocking.
Two weeks later, at a charity gala she'd almost skipped, she met Damon Reyes Wells, heir to a shipping conglomerate three times the size of the Sinclairs' holdings, a man with an easy laugh and no complicated secrets that Bianca could find, because she checked, thoroughly, before she let herself feel anything for him at all. He proposed within four months. It was, everyone agreed, a wonderful match.
Diane was delighted. Richard was delighted. Bianca smiled through every congratulation and told herself, over and over, that she had made the smart choice, the safe choice, the choice a person with actual sense would make.
She never told anyone what was in the file.
But some nights, lying awake beside a fiance she'd chosen for exactly the right practical reasons, she thought about the sentence she'd read on a screen that no longer existed, and wondered what her stepsister was walking into, and told herself, again, that it wasn't her problem.
She was almost sure she believed it.
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