Chapter 2 - The Shadows of Wayzata
The rain was lashing against the tinted windows of my SUV as I drove toward the decaying outskirts of the city, far away from the glittering skyscrapers of downtown Minneapolis.
Marcus had managed to track down Nellie’s current living arrangement through a network of underground charitable volunteers. She wasn't just living under a bridge; she had taken refuge in an abandoned railway spur behind an industrial rail yard, sharing a damp, corrugated-tin shack with a few other destitute souls.
When I pulled up, the mud sucked at the tires of my luxury vehicle, a stark, obscene contrast to the poverty surrounding me. I stepped out into the freezing downpour, ignoring the water soaking through my custom Italian wool suit.
I didn't care about the mud. I didn't care about the cold.
All I could see was Nellie’s face under the bridge—the haunted eyes, the missing leg, the terrified way she shielded herself. “You already helped enough when you threw me out while I was pregnant.”
I navigated the jagged terrain of gravel and rusted iron until I found the shelter. A flickering halogen work light illuminated a makeshift wooden door held together by duct tape.
I raised my fist and knocked.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Inside, a sharp intake of breath sounded, followed by the metallic scrape of a crutch against concrete.
The door creaked open an inch. A pair of dark, exhausted eyes peered out into the gloom. When Nellie recognized my face through the narrow gap, her whole body went rigid.
"Go away, Julian," she whispered, her voice trembling with a mixture of raw grief and long-suppressed fury. "You’ve already taken everything from me. My home, my dignity, my... my son."
"Nellie, open the door," I pleaded, pressing my palm flat against the rotting wood. "I know about Sawyer."
The moment those words left my lips, the air vanished from the space between us.
The door flew open. Nellie stood there, gripping her single crutch under her left arm, her right pant leg pinned up neatly at the thigh, fastened with safety pins. Her face was pale as chalk, her knuckles white as she squeezed the grip of the crutch.
"What... what did you say?" she breathed, her voice cracking.
"I saw the documents," I said, stepping forward slowly, keeping my hands visible so she wouldn't think I was a threat. "I saw his birth certificate. I saw the death certificate. And I saw my mother's signature covering up the accident."
Tears spilled over Nellie’s eyelids, cutting clean tracks through the grime on her cheeks. She didn't scream. She didn't hit me. Instead, she let out a dry, shuddering sob that sounded like glass breaking inside her chest.
"You didn't know?" she asked bitterly, tilting her head back. "For fifteen years, Julian... I thought you orchestrated it. I thought you found out I was pregnant, panicked that it would ruin your pristine social standing, and conspired with your mother to rob me blind and cast me out to rot."
"I swear to God, Nellie, I knew nothing," I said, dropping to my knees right there in the freezing mud, ignoring the filth staining my trousers. "My mother told me you took the thirty thousand dollars and wanted a clean break. She told me you were barren. She lied about everything."
Nellie stared down at me, searching my face for any trace of the arrogant, blind doctor she had married all those years ago. What she saw was a broken man, hollowed out by the realization that his entire life had been built on a foundation of calculated, murderous deception.
"Thirty thousand dollars?" Nellie let out a bitter, humorless laugh. "I never saw a dime of that money, Julian. Your mother cornered me the day after you left for your business trip to Chicago. She had two men in black suits standing behind her. She threw a single envelope at my feet containing adoption papers for an abortion clinic and a demand that I sign away all marital rights. When I refused—when I told her I was carrying your child—she had her men throw me down the marble stairs in the foyer."
My blood ran instantly cold. My vision tunneled.
"What... what did you say?" I whispered, my voice barely audible over the roaring rain.
"I lost the first pregnancy scare right there on those stairs," Nellie continued, her eyes burning with a dark, terrifying fire. "Or so we thought. But a month later, I discovered I was still pregnant with twins—or at least, I had been. One didn't make it. But Sawyer... Sawyer survived. I hid in a women's shelter across state lines. I raised him on scraps, working three cleaning jobs with my bare hands, keeping him hidden because your mother’s private investigators were hunting us like dogs."
She leaned forward, her face inches from mine, her breath tasting of bitter coffee and cold air.
"And how did I lose my leg, Julian? Do you want to know? Two years after Sawyer died, a sleek black town car tried to run me off the highway near our apartment complex. They wanted to tie up loose ends. I swerved into a guardrail. My leg was crushed beyond repair, and the hospital amputated it below the knee because I couldn't afford the advanced vascular surgery that could have saved it. Your family didn't just kill our son, Julian. They tried to hunt me down until there was nothing left of us."
I sat frozen in the mud, the rain washing over my face, mixing with the hot tears streaming from my eyes.
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Every single pillar of my life—my career, my mother's legacy, my wealth, my marriage to Olivia—was built on a pile of corpses and buried lies.
"They're going to pay," I whispered, the words hardening into cold, calcified steel as I looked up at her. "Every single one of them. Starting with my mother."
