Mia closed her eyes. “Then make it a house where people listen.”
I carried those words back with me.
At the mansion, Detective Penn was waiting.
“We found Owen’s apartment,” she said.
“Empty?”
“Mostly.”
“What did you find?”
“A laptop wiped clean, several burner phones, and printed floor plans of your house.”
She handed me a photograph.
It showed the floor plan marked in red.
The cellar.
The safe room.
The library.
And the nursery wing.
“Nursery wing?” I asked.
Detective Penn watched me. “Is that what you call it?”
“No. We don’t use that wing.”
“Someone labeled it.”
I looked closer.
In red ink, beside the unused rooms on the second floor, someone had written:
Future Vale heir.
A chill moved through me.
Claire and I had discussed children in vague terms, never plans. Six weeks from marriage, the idea had seemed distant, softened by future tense.
Someone else had made it strategy.
Detective Penn continued, “We also found a draft petition saved on one of the phones. It references inheritance claims, family recognition, and potential guardianship.”
“Guardianship of whom?”
“We don’t know yet.”
My mind went to Harper, then rejected it.
No.
But Detective Penn’s face told me she had considered the same possibility.
“She isn’t my child,” I said.
“No one said she was.”
But she had been living in my house.
Dependent on my staff.
Loved by me in the quiet, unclaimed way a man loves a child he has no right to call his.
A child could be leverage without being blood.
I looked toward the stairs.
“Where is Claire?”
“In the library.”
“Has she asked to leave?”
“No.”
“Has she asked for me?”
“Yes.”
I found her sitting alone, her attorney asleep in a chair nearby. She looked up when I entered.
“I didn’t know,” she said immediately.
I closed the door behind me.
“I need better than that.”
She nodded, tears rising. “I know.”
I sat across from her.
For the first time since I had proposed, I looked at Claire not as my future wife, not as the elegant woman who had softened the edges of my life, but as a person made of choices I did not fully know.
“How did you meet Owen?”
“Through Celeste.”
“How did you meet Celeste?”
“Victoria Lang.”
“How did Victoria know you?”
“Charity work. She donated to the literacy foundation.”
“Did Celeste suggest revising the prenup?”
Claire hesitated.
That hesitation told me enough.
“Yes,” she whispered. “But not the way you think. She said it would make me look independent. That people would accuse me of marrying you for money unless I insisted on clear terms.”
“And Owen?”
“He said the same. Casually. Once in the car. I thought he was being protective.”
“Protective.”
The word tasted bitter.
Claire wiped her eyes. “I was embarrassed. Your world is… enormous. Everyone around you has history, rules, loyalties. I wanted to enter it with dignity.”
“So you let strangers advise you on our marriage.”
Her face crumpled. “Yes.”
It was not the answer I wanted.
It was probably the truth.
“Did you ask Mia to go to the cellar?”
“No.”
“Did you tell Harper her mother went to Pennsylvania?”
“Yes.”
I went still.
Claire’s voice broke. “Owen told me Mia had left suddenly because her grandmother was ill. He said she’d asked him to tell us because she was embarrassed about leaving during wedding preparations. Harper was crying, and I thought…” She covered her mouth. “I thought I was comforting her.”
“You told a child her mother left without saying goodbye.”
“I know.”