A VOW FOR VENGEANCE

Chapter Eleven: The File On Him

Hanna's POV

My heart stopped for exactly one second.

"Keeping what from you?" I asked, trying to sound calm.

Isla studied me a moment longer, then her whole posture softened, arms uncrossing, and the sharp edge in her voice melting into something almost gentle.

"That you have been hurting, Hanna." She crossed the room and took both my hands in hers. Her fingers were cold. "You do not have to hide it from me. I am your mother. I know heartbreak when I see it."

I was confused, "Heartbreak?"

"You ended things with Lucas so suddenly, and then you have been out at all hours, coming home looking like you have not slept properly in days." She squeezed my hands. "That is not a woman who is fine but running away from something she is not ready to face."

"Mom, I am fine..."

"You do not have to pretend with me." She let go of one hand to brush a strand of hair from my face. "Lucas still loves you. Anyone can see that. Whatever happened at the party, whatever foolish thing or wounded pride made you say in front of everyone, I can make it disappear. One phone call and it never happened. Nobody in this city remembers a scandal I decide to erase."

"I do not need you to fix anything."

"Everyone needs help sometimes, even you." She smiled. "Give him another chance, Hanna. You have spent years building a whole future with that boy. Do not throw that away over one bad night."

Before I could answer, I heard the front door open and Victoria walked into the living room. She had a thick envelope tucked under her arm, and stopped the second she saw the three of us gathered in the living room.

Her eyes found mine first, then looked at Isla.

"What is that?" Isla asked, nodding at the envelope.

I felt the whole room tilt.

"Nothing important," Victoria said quickly. “It is just some papers for work.”

"It looks important." Isla was already crossing the room toward her.

I moved before I could think it through. I wrapped my arms around Isla from the side, pulling her into a hug she was not expecting, my face pressed against her shoulder so she could not see mine.

"I have been having such a hard time since Dad collapsed," I said, my voice cracking just enough to sound real. "I do not know why I have been acting like this. I think I do need help, and maybe you are right about Lucas. I will think about it. I promise."

Isla went still in my arms, surprised, then relaxed, one hand coming up to rub my back. "Oh, sweetheart. Of course you will think about it. Take all the time you need."

Over her shoulder, I caught Victoria's eyes and nodded my chin toward the stairs.

Victoria understood instantly. She slipped past us and disappeared up the staircase without another word. I held the hug a moment longer than I needed to, just to buy Victoria time, then pulled back and wiped my eyes."Thank you for caring," I whispered.

"Always." Isla patted my cheek. "Go rest. We can talk more about Lucas later."

I nodded and climbed the stairs slowly, not once looking as Lucas' direction. My heart was beating fast the entire way, and did not let myself breathe properly until my bedroom door was shut behind me.

Victoria was already sitting on my bed, envelope open in her lap.

"That was close," she said.

"Too close." I sat beside her. "Tell me you have something good."

"More like I have something strange." She pulled out a stack of papers and spread them across the blanket. "The scandals are exactly what you would expect. Rejected board seats, three of them, all in the last two years. A Driving Under the Influence, that somehow never made the papers. Two lawsuits, both settled quietly before they went to trial. All standard rich boy problems"

"Well, none of that surprises me." I said, turning the pages of the paper.

"This will." She pulled out a separate, thinner folder and handed it to me. "Look at the dates."

I opened it and started reading, and the further down the page I went, the slower I read.

"There is nothing here," I said.

"Exactly." Victoria leaned forward. "Five years, Hanna. From age nineteen to twenty four. No photographs, no headlines. No tax records, no travel records, nothing showing up under his name anywhere in that period of time. Before nineteen, he is everywhere, in news and blogs, every family photo. Then he disappears And after five years, he comes back exactly the way we know him now. But those five years in between do not exist anywhere I looked."

I looked at the empty pages. "People do not just disappear for five years. There has to be some kind of trace."

"That is what I thought too." She tapped the empty pages. "It is like he disappeared, and then came back exactly like this."

I stared down at the blank space in the file where a person's entire life should have been, five years reduced to nothing, no record, no witness, no single photograph proving where he had gone or what had happened to him there.

"Find out where he was," I said quietly.

"I tried. I hit a wall everywhere I turned. Both his hospital records and travel records are sealed. Even people who used to know him well went quiet the second I mentioned that specific gap."

"Sealed by who?"

"That is the part I could not get to." Victoria said. "Whoever did this had money, and enough of it to make years of a person's life simply stop existing on paper."

I sat there holding the empty file in my lap, thinking about the man I had married a week ago, and realized I had built an entire plan around a stranger whose most important years were locked away where nobody, not even Victoria, could reach them.

Victoria's phone buzzed on the blanket between us. She glanced at it, frowned, and turned it toward me.

An unknown number.

Stop asking questions about Stefan Walter. Some doors do not open twice.

Victoria kept the phone down slowly. "Nobody knew I was asking. I was careful."

"Clearly, not careful enough."