I stared at the wrinkled paper in my trembling hands.
“If Rowan ever discovers the truth, make sure he never learns what happened to the third baby.”
A third baby. Triplets. Maren hadn’t just given birth to twins on that lonely,"s' agonizing week after I threw her out into the cold. She had carried three of my children. And one of them was gone.
“Where is the other child, Vance?” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was a guttural whisper, raw with a mix of terror and boiling rage.
Arthur Vance, a man I had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to protect my interests, wouldn’t look me in the eye. He reached for a glass of amber liquid on his desk, his hand noticeably shaking. “Rowan… you have to understand how the world works. Tessa Whitmore’s father owns half the real estate development contracts in this state. When she came to me with a blank check and a rewrite of your divorce dossier, I didn’t have a choice.”
I lunged across the desk, grabbing him by his silk tie, pulling his face inches from mine. “Where. Is. My. Child?”
“I don’t know!” Vance gasped, choking. “I swear to you, I don’t know! Tessa handled the medical staff herself. She paid off the attending obstetrician at the rural clinic in Maury County to falsify the records. The birth certificates you see there for the twins—those were the only ones Maren was allowed to keep. The third baby… Tessa took it. Or she disposed of it. I don’t know the details, Rowan, I swear!”
I threw him back into his leather chair. The disgust coating my throat was palpable. Every memory of the last twelve months flashed before my eyes like a grotesque horror movie.
-
Tessa smiling as she moved her designer luggage into my home.
-
Tessa comforting me when I drank myself to sleep, whispering that Maren was a gold-digging traitor.
-
Tessa picking out floral arrangements for a multi-million dollar wedding that was supposed to happen in less than three weeks.
She wasn’t a fiancé. She was a parasite who had systematically dismantled my life, stolen my children’s infancy from me, and left my wife to pick up aluminum cans on the side of a dusty Tennessee highway just to survive.
“If you breathe a word of this conversation to Tessa,” I whispered to Vance, my voice deadly calm, “I will use every dime of my net worth to ensure you spend the rest of your miserable life in a federal penitentiary. Do you understand me?”
Vance nodded frantically.
