PART 3
For several seconds, Nora said nothing. Grant watched the phone while Richard stood beside my bed, his attention fixed on the conversation as though he were waiting to hear a name he had feared for years.
“Nora, who hid my mother?”
The line crackled again, but no clear answer came. All I could think about was what Richard had already told me: my mother had uncovered suspicious financial transfers, false identities, sealed medical documents, and adoption-related records concealed inside the Vale Harbor archives.
Those discoveries suddenly seemed far more personal. Perhaps my mother hadn’t simply stumbled upon someone else’s secret while working in finance. Perhaps she had discovered records revealing that her own life had been shaped by a truth someone had spent decades trying to conceal.
“She eventually found out, didn’t she?”
Richard looked at me.
“Found out what?”
“That she was the missing child.”
His silence gave me my answer. My mother had apparently spent years investigating a mystery that eventually led back to herself, and the letter she left behind might have been her attempt to ensure the truth survived, even if she could never tell me personally.
I lowered my gaze to the torn pages in my hands. The missing final page no longer represented some distant conspiracy. It might contain the explanation for who my mother truly was, why she had been hidden, and what powerful people had been trying to protect since the night Vale Harbor burned.
Then I thought about Michael. His attempt to eliminate me for a fifty-million-dollar insurance payout had initially seemed motivated by greed. But his connection to Ashley, Arthur Voss, and the secrets surrounding my mother made that explanation suddenly feel incomplete.
“Richard, what if the insurance money wasn’t the only reason Michael wanted me gone?”
His expression shifted.
Grant slowly closed the folder.
Neither of them answered.
The terrifying possibility settled over all three of us. If Michael had somehow discovered my mother’s true identity, he might also have realized that the Vale Harbor bloodline had continued through me and now through my newborn son, Lucas.
I looked toward the NICU monitor, where my baby remained unaware of the secrets surrounding his family. The conspiracy that had begun before my mother was even old enough to remember her own name had survived another generation. Michael’s disappearance meant the danger had not ended when I was rescued from the mountain.
I had survived the fall he believed would silence me forever. Now I knew my mother had also survived an attempt to erase her from history. Somewhere within the secrets of Vale Harbor lay the reason both our lives had become targets.
But one question frightened me more than all the others.
If my mother was the baby they had hidden decades ago, who had spent all those years making sure the truth remained buried?
