Chapter 3
The next morning, Graham's attorney arrived. Daniel Whitaker carried a black leather folder and kept glancing at Owen with an expression that made me uneasy.
"Has Graham even asked about the baby?" I asked.
His fingers tightened. He looked toward the door.
Heavy footsteps stopped outside. Daniel stood so quickly his chair scraped.
And Graham Ashford walked in.
He looked like he hadn't slept. His suit was perfect, but there was dried blood on the cuff of his white shirt.
He didn't look at me. He looked at Owen.
He reached inside his jacket and I flinched. Then he placed a small photograph on the table beside my bed. A little boy stood between two adults. The man was Graham's father. But the boy was not Graham.
"You don't have a brother," I said.
"My brother didn't die naturally," he said quietly. "He was killed to alter the Ashford succession."
Before I could ask what that had to do with my son, Graham's phone vibrated. He turned the screen toward me.
It showed the hallway outside my hospital room. Taken less than a minute earlier.
Underneath it was one sentence.
YOU SHOULD HAVE LET THE BABY DISAPPEAR.
What Graham did in the next ten seconds revealed why he had really told me to vanish — and why someone had been watching my hospital room the entire time.
Daniel reached for his jacket.
Graham grabbed the bassinet with both hands and pulled it closer to my bed.
His eyes locked with mine and for the first time that night he wasn't cold.
He was terrified.
The Photo
"I needed everyone to believe I didn't want him," he said.
His voice was low and hoarse.
The hospital door opened before I could answer.
Three men in dark suits entered without knocking. Graham stepped between them and my bed before he even recognized the first man. His shoulders dropped a fraction when he saw Daniel nod.
"You expect me to follow you after what you did?" I said.
My throat was raw. I could barely keep my eyes open, but anger was keeping me conscious.
Graham looked at Owen, then at me.
"I expect you to hate me long enough to stay alive," he said.
That was the last thing he said to me in that room.
Daniel moved fast. He didn't ask for my permission. He pressed the call button, spoke quietly to a nurse who appeared in the doorway, and within minutes two more nurses came in with a wheelchair.
"Claire, we have to go now," Daniel said.
"Where is he?" I asked. I meant Graham.
He was already gone. The door where he had stood was empty.
They lifted me into the chair despite the pain tearing across my abdomen. The gauze, the IV pole, the blood pressure cuff still beeping — everything came with me. I held Owen against my chest with one arm while a nurse held the bassinet with the other, but Graham had already taken the bassinet.
We didn't go toward the elevators.
We went through a private service corridor I didn't know existed. The lights were harsher there. The floor was concrete. Someone was holding a door open at the far end.
"Where is he?" I asked again.
"Was Vanessa part of this?" I said. "Helping him humiliate me?"
Daniel looked toward the driver waiting by the freight elevator and didn't answer. His silence told me enough to keep asking, but he just shook his head.
"Not here," he said quietly.
We left the hospital through an underground loading bay. The air was cold and smelled like exhaust. A black SUV was idling with its back door open. They put me in the middle seat and placed Owen in my arms. I had no bag. No phone. No idea who had arranged any of this.
The only thing I knew was that Graham had apparently planned my disappearance before I even gave birth, and somehow that terrified me more than if he had truly abandoned us.
The Flight
By nightfall, Owen and I were on a private plane.
I had no passport in my hand. Daniel handled everything. He spoke to the crew in a low voice and then sat across from me while Owen slept against my chest, his tiny fist curled against my hospital gown.
"I almost died yesterday," I said.
Daniel nodded.
"My husband divorced me while pretending he didn't care whether I lived," I said. "Someone photographed my hospital room. Then stop treating me like the least informed person in my own life."
He looked at Owen for a long time before he answered.
"Vanessa returned to Chicago six months ago," he said.
"That isn't the same thing?" I asked.
"Vanessa was working with Graham," he said. "Finding the person who ordered his brother's murder."
"That was thirty years ago," I said.
"And the same network has remained close to the Ashfords ever since," he said.
I felt Owen move slightly against me. His breathing was soft and even.
"Because the moment Graham learned you were pregnant, someone started watching you," Daniel said. "Cars outside your house. Hospital inquiries. Attempts to access your medical records."
I remembered Graham suddenly replacing half our security staff during my second trimester. I thought he had been paranoid. Controlling.
Then I remembered another detail. He stopped attending public events with me. He stopped taking me to dinners where photographers would be. At the time, I thought he was embarrassed by my pregnancy.
"Graham distanced himself publicly," Daniel said, as if reading my mind. "To make us look unimportant."
"She became visible again so people would believe Graham was returning to his old life," he said about Vanessa.
The cruelty of it struck me differently now. Graham had made me believe I was disposable. Perhaps because he wanted everyone else to believe it too.
But one question still burned.
"If he was protecting us, why didn't he come when I was hemorrhaging?" I whispered.
Daniel hesitated.
"Vanessa had just identified the man who accessed your maternity file," he said. "Graham was with her because they were following him."
The blood on Graham's cuff flashed into my mind. Dried, dark red against his white shirt.
"Whose blood was on his shirt?" I asked.
Daniel looked away.
"The man who sold your hospital information," he said.
"Claire, Graham believed there was an active plan to kill Owen before you left the hospital."
I pressed my son closer to my body. The plane suddenly felt too small, too high, too exposed.
May you like
"When we land, where am I going?" I asked.
"A secured Ashford property outside Geneva," he said.
