Chapter 6 - Rachel’s Version
Rachel Monroe agreed to meet us at a small private airport outside the city.
She refused to come to the mansion.
“I won’t step onto Cole property,” she said. “Not after what happened.”
Lena sat beside me in the SUV, staring out the window.
“You don’t have to meet her.”
“Yes, I do.”
“You can change your mind anytime.”
She nodded without looking at me.
Rachel was waiting inside an empty conference room near the hangars.
She was thirty-eight now. Older than the photograph I remembered, thinner too, with the same gray-green eyes Lena had.
Lena stopped in the doorway.
Rachel covered her mouth.
“Oh, God.”
Nobody moved.
Then Lena asked, “Why did you leave me?”
Rachel started crying.
Not gracefully. Not quietly.
She folded into a chair as if the question had broken something in her spine.
“I didn’t.”
Lena’s face hardened. “There’s a bank record.”
“I know.”
“Two million dollars.”
Rachel wiped her face. “They put it there after I signed.”
“Signed what?” I asked.
Rachel looked at me.
“A custody waiver.”
The room went silent.
“They told me you had denied she was yours,” Rachel said. “Your mother brought a lawyer. She said if I fought them, they would prove I was unstable, take Lena anyway, and put me in jail for fraud because your company had once paid some of my medical bills.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It didn’t have to. I was twenty-eight, alone, three days postpartum, and your mother had six people in suits telling me they controlled the hospital.”
Lena whispered, “So you signed.”
Rachel nodded.
“I signed something I could barely read because they promised Lena would be raised safely by family until Ethan could be told.”
My stomach turned.
“Who was supposed to raise her?”
Rachel looked toward the door.
“Claire.”
I stared at her.
“Claire wasn’t even part of my life then.”
“She was.” Rachel’s voice shook. “Just not in the way you thought.”
She reached into her purse and placed an old photograph on the table.
It showed Claire standing beside my mother outside St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The date stamp was three days after Lena’s birth.
May you like
Claire was holding my newborn daughter.
