Chapter 7 - The Woman in the Burn Ward
Mateo forced the hidden office door open with a steel fireplace tool. Emma crawled into the library first, coughing as smoke spread across the ceiling. Alex dragged Teresa behind him. The fire was small but deliberate, set inside the passage near a box of old film.
A figure fled through the unused stairwell. Security footage caught only a hooded coat and a hand wearing a square black ring.
Harold Vane wore such a ring in every public photograph.
Ortiz issued an alert, but Vane had already left his office and emptied his apartment. Grace denied knowing where he was. Her attorneys accused Alex of setting the fire to create sympathy.
Daniel's computer survived because Mateo carried it out under his coat. The files included a list of payments to a private clinic called Ashcroft Recovery Center. One patient had been housed there for twenty-one years under the name Evelyn Marsh.
The initials were E.M.
Ashcroft had closed five years earlier, but records had transferred to a state archive. Ortiz found that Evelyn Marsh had suffered severe burns and memory loss after a residential fire. Her admission date was one day after Rosa Marquez died. Her expenses had been paid first by Daniel, then by the Marrow Reserve.
Teresa gripped Emma's hand. "Elena."
The records showed Evelyn had recently been transferred to a long-term care facility two hours north. Alex, Emma, Teresa, Mateo, and Ortiz drove there under police escort.
The woman in Room 312 was thin, silver-haired, and scarred along the left side of her neck. She stared out the window until Teresa spoke her sister's childhood nickname.
"Leni."
The woman turned.
Recognition arrived slowly, then all at once.
Elena began to cry.
Her memory came in fragments. She remembered raising Amelia in a small coastal town. She remembered Grace finding them. She remembered being forced into a car and taken back to the Whitmore property. Daniel tried to intervene. Harold Vane struck him. A second fire started in an outbuilding. Elena woke months later under another name, unable to prove who she was.
She had believed Teresa and Mateo were dead because Grace showed her forged newspaper clippings.
When asked about Alex's mother, Elena became frightened.
"Not here," she whispered. "Walls listen."
Ortiz cleared the room and checked for devices. Mateo found a microphone hidden inside a smoke detector.
Elena then explained that Alex's biological mother was a Fairmont employee named Catherine Reed. Catherine worked as Grace's personal assistant and discovered that Grace had diverted money from Amelia's trust. Daniel and Catherine had an affair during the crisis following Rosa's death. Catherine became pregnant. Grace agreed to raise Alex publicly because Daniel's father would have disinherited them if the scandal emerged.
After Daniel's father died, Catherine asked for her son back.
She vanished.
"Grace told Daniel Catherine abandoned him," Elena said. "Daniel never believed it. He spent years searching."
"Is she alive?" Alex asked.
Elena looked at the square black ring photographed from the security footage.
"Harold knows."
Before they could continue, the facility's emergency doors locked. A message appeared across every television screen in the corridor.
RETURN ELENA TO THE HOUSE.
A second line followed.
OR CATHERINE REED DIES TONIGHT.
Then a live video appeared.
Elena asked Alex to sit near the window where she could see his face. She described Catherine as impatient, funny, and unable to fold a fitted sheet despite working for Fairmont. Catherine used to bring Rosa books from Daniel's library and leave notes in the margins. Elena remembered her arguing that servants learned more about powerful families than lawyers ever did, because lawyers were shown documents while servants saw what people did after the doors closed.
Alex had spent his life imagining his mother's youth through Grace's stories. Now another woman supplied memories that belonged to Catherine: the songs she hummed, the scar on her thumb, the way she wrote the number seven. He felt grief for a living person and resentment toward her at the same time. Elena warned him not to turn Catherine into an innocent simply because Grace was guilty. Everyone who survived Fairmont had made choices inside it.
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A woman sat bound to a chair in a dark room. Her hair was gray, her face bruised, but her eyes were the same clear blue as Alex's.
Behind her stood Fernanda.
