Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
“No.”
The word came out before I could think.
Margaret stared at me.
Benjamin said nothing.
I laughed once.
A short, ugly sound.
“Very funny.”
“No one is joking,” Benjamin said.
Margaret stepped toward me.
“Daniel, Charles was trying to poison you against me.”
“You just said Rebecca Hale was my real mother.”
“I was angry.”
“You don’t accidentally invent a biological mother.”
Noah stirred in my arms.
Benjamin reached into the box and removed a photograph.
He handed it to me.
A young woman stood outside this same mansion.
Dark hair.
Brown eyes.
A soft smile.
She couldn’t have been older than twenty-five.
In her arms was a newborn baby.
On the back, my grandfather had written:
Rebecca and Daniel. April 14, 1992.
My birthday.
I looked at Margaret.
“What is this?”
She said nothing.
“WHO IS SHE?”
“Keep your voice down.”
My laugh was harsher this time.
“You kicked my kid down a staircase, and you’re worried about my voice?”
Margaret’s jaw tightened.
“Rebecca worked for your father.”
“What kind of work?”
“She was his assistant.”
Benjamin shook his head.
“No.”
Margaret glared at him.
Benjamin continued.
“Rebecca Hale was engaged to Thomas Mercer.”
My father.
Or the man I had always believed was my father.
Thomas died when I was five.
A car accident.
Margaret raised me after that.
She told me she and Thomas had been married for two years before I was born.
There were photographs.
Wedding photographs.
Family photographs.
A whole childhood built around that story.
Benjamin handed me another paper.
It was a marriage certificate.
Thomas Mercer.
Rebecca Hale.
Three months before I was born.
I felt sick.
“What about Margaret?”
Benjamin gave me another document.
Margaret Elise Crowley.
Marriage to Thomas Mercer.
Date: sixteen months after my birth.
I looked at her.
“You’re my stepmother.”
She flinched.
I had never seen Margaret Mercer flinch.
“You raised me.”
“Yes.”
“You let me call you Mom.”
“I was your mother.”
“No. You were a woman who never corrected me.”
“I loved you.”
“Then where is Rebecca?”
Margaret’s face hardened.
“She left.”
Benjamin said, “That is what Margaret told everyone.”
I turned to him.
“And what do you think happened?”
He opened the black notebook.
“My grandfather investigated?”
“For years.”
“And?”
Benjamin looked at the next page.
Then at Margaret.
“Rebecca disappeared forty-eight hours after Charles changed his estate plan to protect you.”
My blood went cold.
Margaret headed for the hallway.
One security guard stepped in front of her.
She stopped.
May you like
Benjamin continued.
“And according to Charles’s notes, Rebecca’s last known phone call came from inside this house.”
