Chapter 3 - The Price of Leaving
Ethan turned the phone facedown.
"She doesn't get to run this room."
Olivia looked toward Lucy. Mrs. Alvarez understood.
"Come help me find hot chocolate, sweetheart. Your mother needs a minute."
"No secrets about me," Lucy said.
Ethan crouched beside her.
"You can ask anything when you come back."
"And you'll still be here?"
"Yes."
After the door closed, Olivia stared at the blanket.
"I took the first payment. Eighteen thousand dollars. I used it for rent, the delivery, everything."
The words landed hard.
"She paid you to tell me my child wasn't mine?"
"She said I'd go to prison if I didn't."
Before Lucy was born, Olivia had kept books for the Pierce family's charitable foundation. Money had disappeared from an account she handled. Victoria, then its operations director, showed her transfers bearing Olivia's employee credentials.
"I told her I hadn't done it. She said that wouldn't matter. Your family had lawyers. I had a payroll login and a baby on the way."
"You could have come to me."
"I should have."
She didn't soften it. That made it worse.
"She showed me a letter from you. You wanted a private settlement. You wanted me gone."
"I never wrote a letter."
"I know that now. Back then, I was scared and furious. When you came over, I said the cruelest thing I could think of."
He remembered asking whose baby it was. Remembered her refusing to answer. Remembered leaving before she could see him cry.
"The other checks?"
"I wouldn't cash them. She sent one every year with a reminder that she still had the records. I kept the first check's copy, then all the originals. Proof. Or maybe a way to punish myself."
"Did you ever try to find me?"
"When Lucy was two. I wrote. More than once. Everything came back through the foundation office. Then your father came to see me."
Ethan went still.
"My father?"
Olivia nodded.
"He said you had moved on. He said a scandal would destroy you. He offered to make the missing money go away if I stayed away."
Outside the room, a cart rattled past.
Ethan picked up his phone and called his father.
Walter answered immediately.
"Son, whatever happened at the chapel—"
"I'm standing beside Olivia."
Silence.
"Tell me you didn't know she was alive."
May you like
His father took one long breath.
"Where is the little girl?"
