Chapter 4 - THE GHOST IN THE CLINIC
By afternoon, the Vale estate had transformed into an investigation center. Lawyers arrived in dark sedans. Digital forensics specialists set up encrypted terminals in the library. Marcus posted guards at every entrance and doubled the perimeter patrol. Hannah’s attorney, Elena Torres, drove up from Manhattan and spent the first ten minutes threatening Dominic with criminal charges for unlawful detention. Dominic did not argue. He told her Hannah was free to leave immediately and that a car would take her anywhere she wanted.
Hannah stood in the center of the library holding Celeste’s letter. Freedom should have felt simple. Instead she pictured Sophie’s solemn face, Lily’s anxious fingers twisting the ear of her stuffed rabbit, and Emma sleeping against her shoulder. She also pictured Noah, an unknown child whose photograph had been hidden beneath a music box. “I’m not staying because you brought me here,” she told Dominic. “I’m staying because they deserve the truth. If you try to control me again, I walk.” Dominic nodded once. “Understood.”
Elena made him say it again while she recorded.
The hospital photograph contained no identifying information beyond a faded code along the lower margin. Marcus traced the code to an obstetric unit at St. Vincent’s North, a private hospital that had closed after a merger eleven years earlier. Archived billing records were difficult to access, but Dominic’s legal team obtained a court preservation request before the files could mysteriously disappear. Hannah spent the waiting hours reading Celeste’s notes. The more she read, the more she understood the dead woman not as a wealthy socialite, but as a terrified mother who had realized her family was built inside someone else’s crime.
One page described a meeting Celeste had secretly arranged with a Saint Arden embryologist named Dr. Miriam Shaw. Shaw claimed Voss maintained two sets of records: a legal database and a private ledger tracking high-value genetic material. Donors with desirable medical histories, intelligence scores, appearance profiles, or elite ancestry were labeled “heritage assets.” Hannah’s file had been marked H-17, not because she came from wealth—she did not—but because her screening showed unusual cardiac health, exceptional memory scores, and no known hereditary illness across three generations.
The language disgusted her. She remembered being twenty-one, exhausted from caring for her sick mother and working double shifts at a diner. To Saint Arden, her desperation had been an acquisition opportunity.
Dr. Miriam Shaw had disappeared one month before Celeste’s death.
That evening, Marcus received a hit from a private investigative network. A woman matching Shaw’s age and description had renewed a driver’s license in Vermont under the name Miriam Stone. Dominic wanted to send a team immediately. Hannah insisted on going. “She’s more likely to talk to me than to six men who look like they invade countries for a living.” Marcus almost smiled. Dominic did not, but he agreed.
They drove north before dawn: Hannah, Elena, Dominic, and Marcus. The girls remained at the estate under heavy protection. Snow began appearing along the roadside as they crossed into Vermont, though it was only late autumn. Hannah sat in the passenger seat of the second SUV, watching bare trees flicker past. Dominic sat behind her. For nearly an hour neither spoke.
Finally he said, “I owe you an apology.” Hannah turned slightly. “You owe me several.” “Yes.” He looked out the window. “I spent years believing the only way to protect anyone was to make sure I controlled the room. Celeste hated that about me.” Hannah waited. “She used to say protection without choice is just another kind of cage.”
The admission surprised her because it sounded borrowed from pain, not strategy. “She was right,” Hannah said. “I know.”
Miriam Stone lived above a small bookstore in a Vermont town where the mountains seemed to press close around the streets. When Hannah knocked, no one answered. Marcus noticed movement behind a curtain. Hannah asked the others to wait downstairs. She climbed the narrow staircase alone and spoke through the door. “Dr. Shaw, my name is Hannah Reed. Saint Arden used my eggs without permission. Celeste Vale left me your name.”
The lock clicked.
Miriam was smaller than Hannah expected, with gray hair cut bluntly at her jaw and eyes that seemed permanently tired. She let Hannah inside but kept the chain on until she saw Celeste’s handwritten letter. Then her face crumpled. “I told her to stop,” Miriam whispered. “I told her Voss would destroy anyone who got close.”
Hannah asked about Noah.
Miriam sat down hard at a kitchen table. “He wasn’t supposed to survive.”
The room seemed to shrink. Miriam explained that four embryos created from Hannah’s eggs and Dominic’s sperm had been generated during the original cycle. Three were transferred over separate pregnancies carried by Celeste using advanced surrogacy-assisted protocols and gestational support. The fourth embryo had been declared nonviable. But Voss had secretly retained it. Years later, Saint Arden transferred that embryo into another woman without Dominic’s authorization.
“Whose?” Hannah asked.
Miriam looked toward the door as though someone might be listening through the wood. “Vivian Cross Vale. Adrian Vale’s wife.”
Dominic, standing in the hallway now, heard the name.
Adrian had married Vivian twelve years earlier. Their son, Noah, was eleven.
Dominic entered the apartment with a face Hannah could not read. “Noah is my biological son?” Miriam shook her head. “Genetically, yes. Legally, he was recorded as Adrian’s. Vivian was told the embryo came from an anonymous donor pair selected for compatibility. I don’t know whether Adrian knew the truth.”
The betrayal was so vast it seemed almost abstract. Dominic gripped the back of a chair. “Why would Voss do that?”
“Leverage,” Miriam said. “Your brother wanted an heir. Voss wanted influence over both Vale branches. One child could tie two enemies to the same secret.”
Then Miriam revealed the worst part. Celeste had discovered Noah’s identity and planned to tell Dominic, but she delayed because she feared what the brothers would do to each other. She first tried to obtain proof strong enough that neither man could bury the other.
Hannah asked whether Celeste’s car crash had been an accident.
Miriam’s eyes filled with tears. “No.”
She opened a cabinet and removed a sealed plastic bag containing an old flash drive. “Celeste gave me this the week she died. She said if anything happened to her, I should wait until Hannah Reed was found.”
Hannah stared at the drive.
“Why me?”
Miriam’s answer was barely audible.
“Because Celeste believed Voss was afraid of you.”
Before Hannah could ask why, a red laser dot appeared on the kitchen wall.
May you like
Marcus shouted.
The window exploded.
