Chapter 4 - One Recording Rewrote The Family
Julian called Raymond before sunrise.
His uncle answered cheerfully.
“I heard you had excitement at the house.”
Julian had told nobody outside the estate.
“Do you know Maya Collins?”
A pause.
Then Raymond said, “You should have let the girl sleep.”
Julian’s blood went cold.
“Why?”
“Because when she wakes up, she starts asking the same questions her
mother did.”
The call ended.
Independent attorney Nora Bennett arrived an hour later and immediately
separated facts from assumptions.
Raymond’s words were suspicious.
They were not proof.
The old recording was powerful.
It was not a DNA test.
Nora ordered preservation of the payroll servers, hidden-room files,
access logs, and every device that touched Olivia’s credentials.
She also ordered Maya home on paid leave.
Maya refused at first.
“If I leave, whoever did this wins.”
“You can’t investigate while collapsing,” Nora said. “Rest is not
surrender.”
Maya finally agreed.
Before leaving, she consented to independent kinship testing with
Julian.
The preliminary result arrived the next afternoon.
They were close relatives.
But Maya was not Julian’s sister.
The laboratory requested additional family samples before defining the
relationship.
That opened a new question.
If Margaret intended to call Maya his sister, perhaps she meant legally
rather than biologically.
Nora petitioned for Maya’s sealed birth record.
The original certificate listed a different mother.
CAROLINE MERCER.
Maya stared at the name.
“My mother was Eleanor Collins.”
“Eleanor raised you,” Nora said carefully. “That doesn’t necessarily
mean she gave birth to you.”
Julian remembered a name his mother once used during an argument with
Charles.
Caroline.
He had been a teenager.
His father had ordered him out of the library.
Evan searched archived school records.
Caroline Mercer had existed.
She was Charles Mercer’s daughter with Eleanor Collins.
She later used the name Caroline Collins.
Then her records disappeared shortly before Maya’s birth.
Eleanor had not raised her daughter as Maya’s aunt or grandmother.
She had raised her granddaughter as her own child.
Maya’s face went white.
“Then where is my mother?”
Evan’s answer came from a printer log in the head butler’s office.
A photograph had been printed eleven days earlier.
Caroline Collins was in it.
Older.
May you like
Thin.
But alive.
