Chương 6
“You accessed my foster records.”
“I was trying to understand why the Sterling investigators were interested in you.”
“Before you proposed?”
Another silence.
This one answered.
Julian’s voice hardened. “People are telling you a version that helps them.”
“Did you take my DNA from my hairbrush?”
“I made sure you were protected before anyone could make a claim against you.”
“You tested me without telling me.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“When?”
“When I knew what Eleanor wanted.”
Clara rested her hand against her belly. “She wanted her daughter.”
“No. She wanted control of the trust. Your existence changes the beneficiary structure. Half her board will move against you the minute you accept that name. Do you think she crashed into court because of love? She had seventeen days. She waited until cameras could see the doors open.”
“The hearing was closed.”
“She knew it would leak.”
“So did you. You filed a forged divorce order.”
“I was trying to get you out before she reached you.”
The lie was smooth enough that Clara felt the old reflex to search for what she had misunderstood.
Then she remembered his face when Eleanor named the trust.
“You didn’t look protective.”
“I panicked.”
“You said I was supposed to disappear.”
“I meant disappear from the litigation. From the press. I was trying to send you somewhere safe.”
“With forty-three dollars?”
He exhaled sharply. “The accounts are frozen, Clara. Mine too. Everything is chaos.”
“Mine was emptied before the freeze.”
“That was temporary.”
“So was our marriage?”
He did not answer.
Mara leaned against the refrigerator, watching Clara’s face.
Julian spoke again, quieter. “I loved you.”
Past tense.
Clara felt the words enter and settle.
“You loved what?” she asked.
“That isn’t fair.”
“Was it my face? My records? The trust? Did you love how grateful I was when you paid for things? Did you love that I didn’t have parents who would ask why you needed me to sign papers?”
“I made mistakes.”
“You built companies with my mother’s money.”
“With money the trust owed you.”
“I didn’t know it existed.”
“You would have. Eventually.”
“And then?”
“We would have had leverage.”
“We.”
“Yes, we.”
Clara looked at the forty-three-dollar balance on her phone.
“Where is my savings?”
“I can get it back.”
“Where is it?”
“Do not make decisions tonight. Do not sign anything Eleanor gives you. Do not let her move you into one of her houses. Tomorrow my lawyer will arrange a meeting.”
“Where is my money?”
He lowered his voice. “Clara.”
She ended the call.
For several minutes, the apartment held only the hum of the refrigerator and the soft scrape of Gregory licking one paw.
Mara took the phone from Clara’s hand and placed it facedown.
“You believed him for a second,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make you stupid.”
“I know.”
“You’re saying that like you don’t.”
Clara stood and walked to the window. Across the alley, a man in a white undershirt watered plants on a fire escape. He moved each pot carefully before wetting the soil, unaware that anyone watched.
“I want my foster file,” Clara said.
Mara crossed her arms. “Tonight?”
“Tomorrow.”
“From whom?”
“St. Agatha’s kept paper copies after the county digitized everything. Sister Pauline used to complain about it.”
“Sister Pauline is eighty.”
“Eighty-three.”
“And dislikes you.”
“She dislikes optimism. I was frequently optimistic.”
Mara considered this. “That is irritating.”
The next morning, three black vehicles were parked outside Mara’s building.
Eleanor had not come herself. Rebecca waited beside the first car holding two coffees and a paper bag.
“I was told not to arrive with an army,” she said. “This is apparently the reduced version.”
Clara looked at the security officers. “Why are they here?”
“Two reporters entered the building at six. One offered your downstairs neighbor five thousand dollars for a photograph through the window. A man connected to Julian’s former records broker was seen across the street.”
Mara pulled the curtain aside. “Which man?”
“He left.”
“Convenient.”
Rebecca handed Clara a coffee. “Decaf. No sugar.”
Clara did not take it. “How do you know?”
“Your medical intake from yesterday.”
“You read my medical intake?”
Rebecca closed her eyes briefly. “I realize how that sounded.”
“It sounded accurate.”
“I was given the discharge summary because I arranged security clearance. I should not have used the information personally.”
“No, you shouldn’t have.”
Rebecca threw the coffee into a trash can without argument.
Clara almost felt bad. Almost.
They drove to St. Agatha’s Home for Children, which had closed as a residential facility years earlier and now operated as a nonprofit resource center. The brick building looked smaller than Clara remembered. The metal swing set was gone. A fenced garden occupied the yard where she and Mara once smoked stolen cigarettes behind a maintenance shed.
Sister Pauline met them in an office that smelled of dust and lemon cleaner.
She was eighty-three, as Clara had remembered, with a narrow face and a hearing aid she claimed worked perfectly despite repeated evidence otherwise.
“You married badly,” she said after examining Clara for several seconds.
Mara coughed to hide a laugh.
Clara sat. “Apparently.”
Sister Pauline looked at Rebecca’s cream suit, then at the security officer outside the door. “And now you’ve brought lawyers.”
“The lawyers arrived before I invited them.”
“They usually do.”
Clara asked for her intake file.
Sister Pauline did not move. “Those records are sealed.”
“I’m the person in them.”
“That has never stopped the government from sealing a thing.”
Rebecca placed a court order on the desk. “This authorizes release directly to Ms. Vale.”
Sister Pauline read the first page, then the second. “Sterling.”
Clara’s shoulders tightened.
“The order uses both names for identification,” Rebecca said.
“I am not using Sterling.”
May you like
Sister Pauline looked at Clara over the paper. “Names are tools. People become foolish about tools.”
She rose slowly and unlocked a cabinet behind her desk. From it, she removed a gray archival box bound with cotton tape.
