Chapter 9 - Claire’s Real Mother
Claire drove to Rebecca’s house with the birth certificate on the passenger seat.
Rebecca looked at it and closed her eyes.
“You found it.”
“Who is Sarah Hale?”
Rebecca sat down.
“My sister.”
Claire stared.
“What?”
“Sarah was my younger sister.”
The room seemed to tilt.
Rebecca’s voice trembled.
“She worked for Alexander Voss when she was twenty-three.”
“As what?”
“An assistant.”
Rebecca looked toward the window.
“They had a relationship.”
“An affair?”
“Alexander wasn’t married.”
Claire waited.
Rebecca continued.
“Sarah became pregnant.”
“With me.”
“Yes.”
Claire could barely speak.
“Then why did Evelyn raise me?”
Rebecca’s face hardened.
“Because Sarah disappeared.”
Claire froze.
“Disappeared?”
“Three days after you were born.”
Rebecca explained that Sarah had planned to leave the hospital with Claire and move to Boston.
But Evelyn, then an administrative employee working for Voss’s legal office, had visited Sarah the night before she vanished.
The following morning, Sarah was gone.
No luggage.
No note.
No bank activity afterward.
“And Evelyn had me?”
“Within two weeks.”
“How?”
“Thomas believed you were hers.”
Rebecca’s eyes filled.
“Evelyn had recently suffered a miscarriage.”
“She told him she had given birth while visiting relatives out of state.”
Claire shook her head.
“That’s insane.”
“It was easier to hide records in 1988 than it is today.”
Claire stared at the birth certificate.
“Did Alexander know?”
“Not immediately.”
“When did he find out?”
“Years later.”
Rebecca stood.
“He confronted Evelyn.”
“What happened?”
“He died six months afterward.”
Claire’s skin went cold.
Alexander Voss had supposedly died from complications after a boating accident.
Then Thomas discovered the secret.
Thomas died in a car after a supposed heart attack.
Claire whispered, “You think my mother killed them?”
“I think your mother has spent decades protecting something.”
“Money?”
“Maybe.”
Rebecca walked to a cabinet and removed a cassette recorder.
“Thomas recorded one conversation with Evelyn.”
Claire stared at it.
Rebecca pressed play.
Static filled the room.
Then Thomas’s voice.
“You stole a child.”
Evelyn answered.
“I saved her.”
“You lied to me for thirty years.”
“I gave Claire a family.”
“What happened to Sarah?”
A long silence followed.
Then Evelyn said quietly:
“Ask Julian’s father.”
Claire looked at Rebecca.
Julian’s father, Richard Mercer, had died five years earlier.
But suddenly the conspiracy was older than Claire’s marriage.
Older than Owen.
Older than Thomas’s death.
May you like
And somehow the Mercer family had been there from the beginning.
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