Chapter Five
994 Words
The Name I Wasn’t Supposed To Find
Zara’s POV
"You look terrible," Rachel said, dropping onto my couch like she owned it. "And before you say bad takeout — I'm not accepting that answer anymore."
I hadn't called her. She had shown up anyway with wine she didn't know I couldn't drink and the particular energy of someone who sensed something was wrong and refused to be kept out of it. That was Rachel in a nutshell. Loud, warm, impossible to shut out. She had been my closest friend since our second year at university and she knew me well enough to know when I was holding something back.
What she didn't know was that I had spent the last forty-eight hours sitting with a secret that was getting heavier by the hour.
"I'm just tired," I said. "Work is intense."
"It's been two weeks, Zara. How intense can it be?"
"Very. My boss is—" I stopped.
Rachel raised an eyebrow. "Your boss is what?"
"Demanding," I finished. "He's demanding."
She watched me for a second too long. "Is he cute?"
"Rachel."
"What? It's a valid question."
I picked up my water glass and said nothing. She let it go but her eyes didn't. Rachel had always been better at reading me than I was comfortable with.
She left at ten. I locked the door, leaned my back against it, and let out a long slow breath.
Seventy-two hours. That was what Daniel had given me. The clock had been running since the morning of our meeting and I had spent most of it doing the one thing I was good at when I didn't know what else to do. Research.
I opened my laptop and sat cross-legged on my bed.
Sophia Vaughn.
Four words on the back of a business card and I had not been able to put them down. Daniel had written them deliberately. He wanted me to look. The question was why — whether it was genuine and he was trying to warn me about something real, or whether it was calculated and he was steering me somewhere that served a purpose I couldn't see yet.
Either way I needed to know who Sophia Vaughn was before I made any decision about what came next.
It didn't take long.
Sophia Vaughn was thirty-one years old, a former consultant at a high-end investment firm, and had been photographed at enough Chicago charity galas and corporate events to have a small but consistent presence in the city's social pages. Beautiful in a very deliberate, architectural way. The kind of woman who understood exactly how she looked and used it like a tool.
She appeared in eleven photographs with Cole Mercer spanning roughly two years. The most recent was fourteen months ago. In most of them she was at his side in the specific way of someone who belonged there — hand on his arm, body angled toward him, comfortable in the proximity.
His girlfriend. Or close enough to it.
I kept searching. Press releases, social columns, anything with her name attached. I found nothing recent. After fourteen months ago she simply stopped appearing. No breakup announcement, no public falling out, no trace of what happened. She was present and then she wasn't.
I sat back and thought about that.
People didn't just disappear from the orbit of a man like Cole Mercer quietly. There was always a story. Always a reason. The question was whose version of the reason was true.
I closed the laptop. I needed to sleep. I needed to think clearly and I couldn't do that when I was running on anxiety and cold coffee and the specific exhaustion of carrying a secret in a body that was already working overtime.
I got into bed and stared at the ceiling.
Ask Cole about Sophia.
I made a decision by morning. Not the one Daniel wanted. Not the one my fear was pushing me toward either. Something in the middle that felt like the only move that actually belonged to me.
I was not disappearing. Not yet. Not until I understood what I was actually walking away from and why Daniel Howe was so determined to make me go.
I went to work. I did my job. I sat through a two-hour strategy meeting and contributed three ideas that my team lead actually wrote down, which meant something. I kept my eyes on my screen and off the glass-walled office at the end of the hall where Cole worked with the door closed and the particular contained energy of someone thinking very hard about something they weren't sharing.
At four o'clock I was in the records room pulling archived campaign files when I heard voices in the corridor outside. I didn't mean to listen. The door was slightly open and the corridor carried sound in a way that the building's architects clearly hadn't considered.
Cole's voice first. Low and controlled.
Then a second voice. Male, older. Familiar in a way that took me three seconds to place.
Victor Mercer.
I had never heard him speak before. I had only seen his name on Daniel's phone screen. But Cole's voice had changed — tightened in a way I hadn't heard before, like something underneath him had gone rigid.
I stood completely still.
I couldn't make out every word. Corridor acoustics swallowed the details. But I caught fragments. Enough. The acquisition. A timeline. A name I didn't recognize. And then very clearly, in Victor's smooth unhurried voice, three words that landed in my chest like stones dropped in still water.
The girl's pregnant.
Silence.
Long, total silence from Cole's side of the corridor.
My heart stopped beating for what felt like a full minute.
Then Cole's voice came back, quieter than before and with something in it I had never heard from him. Not anger. Something colder than anger. Something that had edges.
“How long have you known”
- Writer
