Chapter 10 - The Daughter He Chose
News vans gathered outside the estate by morning. Headlines described a secret Mercer heir, a disputed mansion and a multimillion-dollar family war. Gertrude gave an interview from the courthouse steps, weeping as she said she had protected her son from Thomas’s powerful family.
Charlotte watched for thirty seconds, then turned off the television.
“She cries differently on camera,” Skylar observed.
Charlotte almost smiled. “You notice a lot.”
“People tell the truth with the part of them they forget to control.”
It was something Thomas used to say.
The second key lay inside a walnut clock in Charlotte’s office. Thomas had made it himself. Behind the pendulum they found a strip of microfilm containing account numbers and the phrase CHOICE HOLDS THE ORIGINAL.
The trust named Charlotte as beneficiary, but its older drafts revealed that Thomas had once considered leaving part of the estate to Brandon. He had met Brandon privately before Charlotte’s wedding.
Brandon admitted the meeting only after Naomi produced a calendar entry.
“Thomas offered me fifty thousand dollars to leave you,” he said.
Charlotte felt the old betrayal twist in a new direction. “Did you take it?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I knew you would never forgive him.”
“And you wanted access to him.”
Brandon’s silence answered.
He said Thomas later apologized and offered to help him learn the development business. For nearly a year, Thomas treated him like a son. Then he discovered Brandon had secretly shared company information with Gertrude. Thomas ended the relationship and amended the trust.
“He chose you,” Brandon said bitterly. “He always chose you.”
“I was his daughter.”
“Maybe I was his son.”
“Blood would not excuse what you did.”
The official laboratory archive arrived that afternoon. The original result confirmed Thomas was not Brandon’s father.
But a second test in the file produced a parent-child probability greater than 99.9 percent.
The tested father was Victor Dane.
Naomi stared at the page. “Dane is using his own son to claim Thomas’s estate.”
Charlotte understood Gertrude’s seven years of payments now. They were not consulting fees. They were the price of keeping Brandon’s paternity secret while Dane positioned him inside Charlotte’s life.
When confronted, Brandon went completely still.
Then his phone rang. Victor Dane’s name appeared.
May you like
Brandon answered on speaker.
“Son,” Dane said, “bring me the brass disk, or Skylar learns what happened to her grandfather.”
