Chapter 6 - The House Without Family Photographs
The address led Claire to an abandoned estate outside the city.
She did not go alone.
Vale arranged for a retired investigator named Mara Singh to follow at a distance. Mara had worked the Julian Cross case nineteen years earlier and agreed to help after seeing the DNA report.
The estate stood behind rusted gates and overgrown hedges. Its windows were intact, but no cars occupied the drive.
Claire entered through an unlocked side door.
The interior smelled of dust and cedar. Every wall showed pale rectangles where photographs had once hung. Furniture remained beneath white sheets. A grandfather clock ticked despite years of neglect.
“Hello?” Claire called.
A woman answered from the drawing room.
“You have your mother’s voice.”
Claire stopped.
The woman who stepped into view was in her late sixties, elegant but frail, with silver hair and an oxygen tube beneath her nose.
“My name is Eleanor Cross,” she said. “Julian was my son.”
Claire remained near the door. “Why did you contact me?”
“Because they are going to kill the child.”
The bluntness left no room for politeness.
“Who?”
“The people who paid for her creation.”
Eleanor motioned toward a chair. Claire stayed standing.
Eleanor did not seem offended.
“Julian discovered a way to correct inherited disease before birth,” she said. “He believed the work should be used carefully, publicly, and only when no safer treatment existed. Richard Bennett saw something else. He saw a way to design heirs.”
“Ethan’s father funded the research.”
“He owned it.”
“Was Julian killed?”
Eleanor looked toward the covered windows. “The body in the fire was not my son.”
Claire felt the air leave her lungs.
“Then where is he?”
“I do not know. Adrian helped him escape. Later Adrian betrayed him.”
“Why?”
“Money. Fear. Perhaps both.”
Eleanor reached into a drawer and withdrew a leather journal.
“Julian kept records by hand because he did not trust the digital archive. The final pages mention Sable.”
Claire opened the journal.
Most entries were technical. Near the end, Julian had written a list of names. Claire’s mother appeared among them.
Rose Whitmore.
Claire looked up sharply.
“My mother died when I was sixteen.”
“I know.”
“How did Julian know her?”
Eleanor’s expression softened with pity.
“Your mother was one of the first research volunteers.”
Claire stepped back.
“No.”
“She carried a hereditary mutation linked to cardiomyopathy. Julian treated an embryo created from her egg and your father’s sperm.”
Claire stared at her.
“You are saying I was part of the experiment.”
“You were the first successful birth.”
The room seemed to narrow around her.
Claire remembered her mother’s quiet fear of hospitals, the annual blood tests she had never explained, the locked box Claire found after her death and never opened because grief made ordinary objects unbearable.
Eleanor continued.
“Your genetic profile became the control sequence for Sable. That is why you were chosen. Northbridge needed your records. Ethan’s marriage to you gave them access.”
Claire thought of every blood sample taken during fertility treatment.
“They were studying me.”
“Yes.”
“Did Ethan know?”
“I do not know how much he knew. Richard knew everything.”
A floorboard creaked upstairs.
Eleanor’s face changed.
“No one else should be here.”
Mara’s voice sounded through Claire’s hidden earpiece. “Movement on the second floor. Two people.”
Claire closed the journal.
The front door slammed.
Eleanor grabbed her wrist. “There is a tunnel behind the pantry.”
Footsteps descended the staircase.
Claire helped Eleanor toward the kitchen while Mara entered through the side door. A shout echoed from the hall, followed by the crash of furniture.
They reached the pantry. Eleanor pressed a hidden latch, revealing a narrow passage.
Before Claire entered, she heard a familiar voice behind her.
“Still running toward other people’s secrets.”
Ethan stood in the kitchen doorway.
He was alone, breathing hard, his face twisted with fury.
“You followed me,” Claire said.
“I followed the woman who is trying to destroy my family.”
Eleanor stared at him.
Then she whispered a name that was not Ethan’s.
“Daniel.”
Ethan froze.
Claire looked from one to the other.
“Who is Daniel?”
May you like
Eleanor began to tremble.
“The child Richard Bennett buried before he bought another son.”
