Chapter 8 - The Ghost of Helena
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The ballroom became deathly silent once again.
Margaret Lawson stopped pretending to be a shocked, innocent victim.
For the very first time that day, she dropped the aristocratic facade. She looked at Ruth as though the expensive guests, the flashing cameras, and the imposing security officers no longer existed.
“You should have stayed on your pathetic little farm in Iowa,” Margaret spat, her voice dripping with venomous hatred.
Ruth’s fingers tightened painfully around mine.
“And you should have left Helena alone,” Ruth fired back, her voice remarkably strong for a woman bleeding on a stretcher.
Helena.
My biological mother.
The beautiful woman whose sudden death had always been carefully described to me as a tragic, unavoidable car accident on a rainy night.
My father, Harrison Vance, turned slowly toward Margaret. The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. He was a man who rarely showed emotion, but the look in his eyes right now was purely lethal.
“What did you do to my wife, Margaret?” Harrison demanded, his voice a low, terrifying rumble.
Margaret smiled faintly, a twisted, arrogant smirk.
“You had twenty-five years to prove it, Harrison. And you never found a single shred of evidence.”
Then she turned her chilling gaze toward me.
“You think you just magically discovered your true identity today, Evelyn?” Margaret laughed, a harsh, grating sound.
Her gaze moved slowly toward her son, who was currently staring at her in complete, unadulterated shock.
“I chose you for my son long before either of you knew why,” Margaret confessed proudly.
Garrett stared at his mother, his jaw dropping.
“What are you talking about, Mom?” Garrett asked, stepping away from her as if she were radioactive. “You introduced us at that charity gala. You said she was just a nice girl from the Midwest.”
Margaret did not answer him. She simply adjusted her expensive silk scarf, looking entirely unbothered by the fact that her entire life was collapsing.
The wail of police sirens echoed loudly from the street below, arriving before Margaret could even attempt to reach the exit.
And as uniformed officers flooded into the ballroom to separate everyone and secure the crime scene, I realized with a sickening dread that the forged papers involving my infant son were not the beginning of this crime.
May you like
They were a repetition.
Someone had stolen from my mother. Someone had spent twenty-five years hiding exactly how she died. And Garrett’s mother had deliberately brought her own son into my life to finish what she had started a quarter of a century ago.
