Part 5: The Inheritance and the Girl in the Fire
At St. Catherine’s Medical Center, doctors warned that my daughter’s heart rate was dropping and an emergency delivery might be necessary.
Twenty minutes later, Rachel arrived with two updates: Owen was safe, and police had found Susan locked inside her basement after she activated her phone’s emergency alert.
Nolan had vanished.
Two hours later, medication slowed my contractions.
My baby remained inside me—for the moment.
Susan entered my hospital room with a bruised wrist and finally agreed to reveal who my father truly was.
His name was not Thomas Parker.
It was Thomas Whitmore, and he had worked as an accountant managing trusts and estates for wealthy families.
He discovered millions had been stolen from a trust intended for me.
My grandmother, Margaret Whitmore, founder of the Whitmore Children’s Foundation, had left me a substantial inheritance.
We had lived in poverty because Thomas’s older brother, Charles Whitmore, stole it.
Charles had a son named Evan—the boy who later became Nolan Dawson.
The man I had married was my cousin, and our seven-year marriage had been a calculated path back to the fortune his father had taken.
Susan revealed Charles died seventeen years earlier, but no one knew who had continued controlling the stolen money.
That mystery was why my father had finally returned.
Before I could ask more, an unknown number sent another message: “You’ve learned the first secret. Ask your father what happened to the little girl in the fire.”
The attached photograph showed a burned farmhouse.
Two children stood in front of it: young Evan and a dark-haired girl who looked uncannily like me.
Around her neck hung a silver bird pendant identical to the one my father gave me on my twelfth birthday.
Susan began shaking the moment she saw the image.
“Who is she?” I demanded.
“Her name was Grace,” she whispered. “She was your cousin.”
My breath caught. “Evan’s sister?”
Susan nodded through her tears.
Charles Whitmore had two children—Evan and Grace.
I stared at the farmhouse, the pendant, and the little girl whose face mirrored mine.
“What happened to her?”