Chapter 10 - The Photograph Taken Last Winter
The photograph showed Sarah standing outside a train station.
Snow covered the pavement.
A digital departure board in the background displayed the date.
January 14 of the previous year.
Almost four years after her funeral.
I told myself the image had been manipulated.
A forensic analyst examined it.
The paper, ink, lighting, compression, and environmental details were consistent with a real photograph printed eleven months earlier.
Facial recognition gave a ninety-eight percent match to Sarah.
Detective Ortiz refused to declare her alive.
“Photographs can be staged,” she said. “Someone may have undergone surgery. The image could be designed to destabilize you.”
But I knew Sarah’s posture.
The slight tilt of her head.
The way she held her left hand when she was cold.
There was a scar across her thumb from a kitchen accident when Emily was three.
The scar appeared in the photograph.
Marcus stared at it for several minutes.
“Where was this taken?”
“Grayhaven Station,” Ortiz said. “Northern coast.”
“Rainer owns a research facility near Grayhaven.”
I looked at him.
“Of course they do.”
The photograph raised a question no one wanted to answer.
Whose body had I buried?
After the crash, the car burned.
Identification was made through dental records and a wedding ring recovered from the wreckage.
I never saw Sarah’s face.
My father advised me not to.
Vanessa later praised him for protecting me from that memory.
Ortiz requested an immediate exhumation order.
Preston Vale filed an objection on behalf of an unnamed party claiming family rights.
No one besides me had legal standing to object.
Unless Sarah was alive.
Or unless another relative had been concealed.
The court delayed the exhumation until a hearing could be held.
Meanwhile, Vanessa disappeared.
The hotel where Vale claimed she was staying had no record of her arrival.
Vale insisted he no longer represented her and refused to disclose their last conversation.
His office was searched after investigators connected him to payments from Rainer Biotech.
He vanished before police could question him.
Everything led back to Rainer.
Yet the company’s directors denied knowledge of the hidden laboratory, Bellweather House, or Victor Sloane’s activities.
Victor himself appeared by video at an emergency corporate meeting.
He sat in a wheelchair in a bright Swiss clinic.
His left arm remained motionless.
His speech was slow and slurred.
He claimed his medical condition made travel impossible.
I played the recording from Bellweather.
Victor’s lawyers argued that artificial intelligence could reproduce anyone’s voice.
They accused me of attempting to sabotage the acquisition.
By noon, Mercer Global shares had fallen twenty-three percent.
The board demanded I resign temporarily.
Marcus urged me to accept.
“You need to protect the children,” he said. “Let me stabilize the company.”
“You want control.”
“I want to stop Rainer from destroying everything.”
“The acquisition was your proposal.”
“Because I believed owning Rainer would give us access to their records.”
“You never told me that.”
“I couldn’t.”
I looked at the childhood blood sample bearing his name.
“You keep saying that.”
He flinched.
I removed him as chief financial officer.
He did not argue.
He placed his security badge on the table and left.
An hour later, the board voted to suspend me.
My father’s company was no longer mine.
I took the children to a secure residence outside the city.
Only Ortiz and two trusted officers knew the location.
The house belonged to Sarah’s aunt, Margaret, who had lived overseas for decades.
Margaret died the previous year and left the property unused.
On our first night there, Emily wandered into the attic.
She found a trunk filled with Sarah’s childhood belongings.
At the bottom was a photograph album.
One picture showed Sarah at seventeen, standing outside Bellweather House before the fire.
Beside her was a younger Victor Sloane.
On Sarah’s other side stood a blonde girl about eight years old.
On the back, Sarah had written:
Violet does not remember who she was before they brought her here.
Emily looked at the blonde child.
“That’s Vanessa.”
The resemblance was unmistakable.
Beneath the photograph was a newspaper clipping about the Bellweather fire.
Twelve children were listed among the dead.
The final name was Violet Cross.
Not Violet Sloane.
May you like
Miriam Cross had a daughter.
Vanessa was Miriam’s child.
