Chapter 4 - The Missing Twin“What do you mean he never left the hospital?” I leaned over the desk, my hands gripping the edge of the metal frame. “Did he die?”
“No,” Vance said quietly. “He was adopted through a private agency three weeks after birth. A closed adoption. Sealed records by order of a Cook County judge.”
“How is that possible? Samantha was his mother! She didn't sign away her rights!”
“According to the adoption file,” Vance said, sliding a single sheet of paper across the desk, “she was told the boy didn’t survive the night due to respiratory failure. The hospital issued a death certificate.”
I stared at the paper. My vision blurred. “A fake death certificate?”
“Forged by a medical administrator who retired six months later and moved to Boca Raton with a very comfortable pension,” Vance said. “Someone had deep pockets, Ethan. Someone with enough influence in Chicago to bypass standard DHS protocols and push an emergency placement through the system before Samantha was even discharged from the recovery ward.”
I didn’t need to ask who.
Margaret.
My mother had not only paid Samantha off; she had orchestrated the theft of my son.
“Who has him?” I asked, my voice barely audible above the hum of the office fluorescent lights. “Where is my son?”
“That’s the part you’re not going to like,” Vance said, opening a drawer and pulling out a glossy photograph. It had been taken with a long lens outside a private Montessori school in Winnetka—one of the wealthiest suburbs on the North Shore.
A sleek black Mercedes SUV was parked at the curb. A well-dressed woman with blonde hair tied back in an expensive silk scarf was lifting a little boy out of the backseat. The boy had dark, curly hair and Samantha’s sharp, intelligent eyes.
“Do you recognize her?” Vance asked.
I stared at the woman in the photograph. It wasn't my mother. It was someone much closer to home. Someone who had been sitting across from me at Thanksgiving dinners, smiling, pouring wine, and asking about our wedding plans.
It was Chloe’s mother, Eleanor Vance.
No—not Vance. Eleanor Sterling.
May you like
“Eleanor,” I breathed, the room spinning around me. “Chloe’s mother.”
“Adoptive parents: David and Eleanor Sterling,” Vance confirmed. “They couldn't have children of their own. Your mother arranged the placement through her private charitable foundation. They paid a quarter of a million dollars into an offshore trust, disguised as a 'philanthropic donation.' And your son has been growing up three miles away from your mother’s estate, raised by your fiancée’s parents.”
