Chapter 7 - THE MIDNIGHT VISITORWe returned home in near-total silence. The snow was falling harder now, wrapping the quiet suburban neighborhood in a thick, insulating blanket of white.
Inside the house, Alejandro immediately went to his home office, booting up his secure military-grade laptop and inputting every single legal password he possessed to access the federal surrogate registry.
I sat on the living room sofa, my hands resting protectively over my stomach as sharp, irregular Braxton Hicks contractions began to ripple through my body. The stress of the visitation, combined with Victoria’s final, venomous threat, was taking its toll.
“Al,” I called out softly, wincing as a sharp wave of pain gripped my lower abdomen. “Al, I think... I think you need to come out here.”
Before Alejandro could answer from the study, the front doorbell rang.
Ding-dong.
It was midnight. The neighborhood was entirely asleep, buried under two feet of fresh snow. Nobody delivers mail or packages at midnight in a blizzard.
Alejandro stepped out of the study instantly, his hand dropping automatically to the sidearm holstered inside his belt. He motioned for me to stay back behind the couch.
He crept toward the front foyer, peered through the frosted glass of the front door, and flipped on the porch light.
Standing on our front step was not a police officer, a federal marshal, or a process server.
It was a young woman in her early twenties, wearing a heavy winter parka, her face wet with melting snow and tears. In her arms, she clutched a thick manila envelope identical to the ones Victoria had used to destroy our lives.
Alejandro unlocked the deadbolt and slowly pulled the door open.
“Can I help you?” he asked, his voice guarded and tense.
The young woman looked up, her eyes wide with a mixture of terror and fierce determination.
“Are you Captain Alejandro Vance?” she asked breathlessly.
“I am.”
She stepped across the threshold, ignoring the melting snow dripping onto our entryway, and thrust the heavy manila envelope directly into his hands.
“My name is Chloe Sinclair,” she said, her voice shaking violently. “My mother died in a suspicious car accident twenty years ago. Before she died, she told me that if a woman named Victoria Vance ever came looking for our family’s original estate documents, I was to bring this directly to her son.”
Alejandro stared at the girl, his breath catching in his throat. Sinclair. The exact same surname from the hidden adoption folder we found in the underground vault.
“Who are you to Victoria?” Alejandro asked, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the envelope.
“She isn't my aunt, and she isn't my guardian,” Chloe sobbed, tears spilling down her cold cheeks. “She’s the woman who stole my grandmother’s identity, locked my mother away in a private sanitarium, and tried to do the exact same thing to me before I escaped her firm last week.”
She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a certified, stamped legal document bearing the seal of the federal surrogate court.
“And Captain Vance... she didn't just file a prenatal trust for your unborn child. She filed a missing-persons warrant against your wife, scheduled to execute at midnight tonight, using a forged medical declaration claiming Elena was dead.”
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Before Alejandro could even process the words, a sharp, piercing pain ripped through my lower back, and warm water broke across the floorboards beneath my feet.
“Al,” I screamed, doubling over as the first true contraction hit with blinding intensity. “The baby... the baby is coming now.”
