Chapter 9 - What Vanessa Finally Admitted
She came back an hour later. No knock this time — she tried the handle, found it open, and pushed the door in.
I was in the chair by the window. I didn't get up.
She sat on the edge of the bed, the same spot I'd sat in the night I arrived, and looked at her hands before she looked at me.
"How much do you know about Daniel?"
"Enough to see you've been waiting all day to find out how much I know."
She didn't argue with that.
"My father never said his name. Not once my whole life. I didn't even know he existed until I was nineteen — I found an old photo in a box in the attic. I asked Dad about it and he told me Daniel was gone and I should leave it alone."
"Did you?"
"For a while." She looked at the window. "When Dad told me six months ago that he'd found you — that you were alive, that you'd been in foster care all these years — I didn't understand it at first. I knew he'd lost a baby. He told me that much when I was a kid. He said your mother had a daughter who didn't survive." She paused. "When he told me you were alive, my first thought was that somebody had made a horrible mistake. My second thought was Eleanor."
"Because you knew she was the one who told him."
"I suspected. I'd always felt something was off about that story. The way Dad would shut down if it came up. The way Eleanor changed the subject every single time your mother's name was said out loud." She looked straight at me. "I called Eleanor that day. The day Dad told me about you."
"I know."
"I asked her if she'd lied to my father. Straight out."
"What did she say?"
"She said it was more complicated than I understood. She said if I let Dad bring you into this house, everything would come apart, and there would be consequences for people I cared about." Her jaw tightened. "She brought up Daniel."
I leaned forward.
"What did she say about him?"
"That he'd been involved. That if the truth about you ever came out, it wouldn't just land on her — it would land on Daniel too, and that Daniel had information that could damage the estate and gut my inheritance no matter what Dad's will said." She shook her head. "She was trying to scare me. I think she'd been scaring people for a very long time."
"Did it work?"
Vanessa was quiet a moment.
"I told Marcus Delaney to get ready for a contest. Yes." She looked at her hands again. "I told myself it was about the will. About Dad rewriting everything after one week with a stranger. But part of it — part of it was fear. If Eleanor was tangled up in something big enough to hide a child for thirty-one years, then I grew up with that woman at our table. I let her hold my hand at my father's funeral." Her voice caught on the last word. "I didn't want to know what that made me."
I didn't say anything.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," Vanessa said. "I'm asking you to understand I didn't have the whole picture. I knew something was wrong. I chose not to look at it head-on. That's its own kind of failure. I know that."
"It is," I said.
She nodded. She stood up.
"Daniel's in Porto," she said. "I found that out this morning too. I don't know if he's heard that Dad is gone. I don't know if he knows about you." She moved toward the door. "If Patricia Vance is as good as Marcus says, she'll find him."
"She already has his name."
Vanessa stopped in the doorway, her back to me.
"Eleanor called me after she texted you," she said. "Told me to hold the line. Told me the contest would win and I should trust her." She turned around. "I told her I was done."
She left the door open behind her.
I stayed in the chair a long time after that. The light outside had turned low and gold. Somewhere below me I could hear Vanessa on the phone — voice quiet, too quiet for words, but the tone was one I hadn't heard from her before. Tired. Finished.
My phone rang. Patricia.
"Daniel Whitfield is in Porto," she said. "I have a contact there. He's agreed to talk to us."
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"When?"
"He called my contact back within an hour of being reached. His exact words, quoting: 'I've been waiting thirty years for someone to ask.'"
