HER SECRET HEIRS: TEN BROTHERS STAND GUARD

Chapter 9 What Tonia Knows

Evelyn's POV

Benjamin changed his mind before we reached the door.

"Not tonight," he said. "We are not walking into something we do not understand in the dark."

I wanted to argue…the words were already building in my chest, but I'm no longer a baby who would let out words without having a rethink. I had grown to learn when pushing made things worse, and the look on Benjamin's face told me this was not stubbornness. It was caution from a man who had spent fifteen years searching for me and was not about to lose me to a stranger's message in the night.

I sat back down.

The message stayed on Emmanuel's phone. He took a screenshot of it, forwarded it to two people I did not know, then set the device face-down on the table.

Nobody slept well that night. Aunt Mirabel showed me her guest room, the narrow one with the blue curtains she had sewn herself thirty years ago. I lay on top of the covers with my hand on my stomach, listening to the house settle and shift around me.

Through the wall, I could hear Benjamin and Emmanuel talking. Their voices were too low to make out words, but the rhythm told me everything — short sentences, pauses, more short sentences. They were working through a problem the way careful men do, from every angle, over and over, until they found the one that held.

I thought about Tonia sitting across from an elderly nurse in a care home. I thought about her walking in with her designer bag, her red lipstick and her recording device hidden somewhere on her body. I thought about the way she had walked into the Williams house three years before I ever knew who I was, and I realized that she had known the truth all along, but she never said a word.

The pale light of early morning was just beginning to shine behind the blue curtains when I got up and went to the kitchen.

Benjamin and Emmanuel were at the table. Emmanuel had papers spread in front of him. A half-full cup of cold coffee sat at his elbow. Benjamin looked up when I walked in and did not tell me to go back to bed.

I pulled out a chair and sat across from them.

"Tell me what you know about Tonia," I said.

Emmanuel glanced at Benjamin…Benjamin nodded.

"Tonia Sinclair," Emmanuel began, "came back to Harlow City four months ago. Before that, she was in Europe. She studied music in Vienna for three years, then spent two years in Paris. She returned right around the time we decided to search for you in this city."

"That is not a coincidence," I said.

"No my dear…It is not."

"She knew I was here."

"We believe so." Emmanuel straightened a paper on the table. "She attached herself to Richard, restarted their relationship, and began positioning herself inside the Williams household. Once she was in, she needed you out before we found you."

I pulled my knees up to my chest on the chair, the way I used to sit when I was nine years old at Aunt Mirabel's table working on homework. "So she knew about the Valentine family. She knew I was the missing daughter."

"She knew enough to be afraid of it," Benjamin replied.

The back door opened and Matthew came in from outside. He had been checking the perimeter in the dark, which was apparently something he did when he could not sleep. He poured himself a glass of water and leaned against the counter.

"The investigator reached the care home an hour ago," Emmanuel said. "Sandra is still there. She has not been moved but the staff say she has been very anxious since Tonia's visit. She keeps asking if anyone has come for her."

"Someone is coming for her," I said. "That message last night proved it."

Emmanuel nodded. "I want to trace the number before we do anything else. If that message came from someone who knows about your birthmark, it either came from someone in this room, someone who was close to your mother, or someone who has been watching you for a very long time."

"Or someone who was at the hospital the night I was born," I said quietly.

They all looked at each other with shock on their faces.

Matthew set his glass down carefully.

"Sandra sent it herself?" Benjamin said.

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe Sandra told someone else to send it. Someone she trusts. Someone who knows the birthmark was on record."

Emmanuel was already reaching for his notepad. "If Sandra initiated contact, that means she wants to talk. It also means she is more afraid of Tonia keeping that recording than she is of whoever told her to stay quiet twenty-six years ago."

I looked at Benjamin. "So now can we go?"

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at the ceiling. It was the first time he had looked anywhere other than straight forward since I had met him.

"We will go in the morning," he said. "All of us."

I nodded and stood up to make tea for the table.

The kettle had just started to a boil when Emmanuel's phone buzzed again. He picked it up and his face changed.

Emmanuel's face never did anything dramatically but the slight pause, the way his hand tightened just barely on the device, told me the message was not good.

He turned the screen toward Benjamin.

I came around the table and looked.

It was a report from the investigator. Three sentences.

"Sandra's room has been checked by an unidentified visitor in the last hour. No record of sign-in. Facility management is reviewing camera footage now."

Someone had already been to Sandra before us.