The private investigator called on a Tuesday morning while I was still in my bathrobe, and the first words out of his mouth made me sit down so fast I nearly missed the chair entirely.
"Your father doesn't know you exist."
I gripped the phone harder. My coffee sat untouched on the table, steam curling into the cold air. Three days of waiting. Three days of jumping every time my phone buzzed. Three days of imagining every possible outcome, and somehow I had never imagined this one.
"Tell me everything," I said.
The investigator, a quiet man named Reeves who smelled like cigarettes and old paper the one time I met him in person, cleared his throat. "Arthur Sterling had a relationship with a woman named Elena Marchetti twenty eight years ago. She worked in his company. Junior accounting.
