Part 3: The Man Who Should Be Dead
Neither of us slept. In the morning, we took the photograph to Naomi’s office instead of confronting anyone. Owen watched me set it on the table. “Was Vanessa pregnant then?” “The photograph suggests it,” I said, “but we don’t know the circumstances.”
Gregory arrived twenty minutes later and studied the image for a long time. “Miles was born in March that year,” he said slowly. “Six weeks after—” He stopped. Owen finished the sentence for him. “After me. I was born in January.” Gregory looked at him as if the arithmetic itself had wounded him.
That afternoon, we met Margaret Doyle, a retired clinic administrator who had agreed to help search the old files. She showed us an index rather than medical records, careful to protect anyone’s private health information. The index confirmed that someone had once tried to collect correspondence from my file using a letter bearing what looked like my signature. I knew at once it was not mine. The final curve of the last letter was wrong.
Margaret had refused to release the correspondence. The next day, Richard Pryce arrived with a letter from the Vance family office, claiming I had asked for the matter to be handled privately. “I never asked for that,” I said. “I know that now,” Margaret replied. “At the time, I was told you wanted confidentiality.”
Owen’s jaw tightened. “Did Vanessa know my mother was pregnant?” Margaret glanced at me before answering. “She had seen the intake form. Mr. Pryce asked me to change the name on an authorization. I refused. Someone changed it anyway.”
That evening, Gregory showed us a letter he had found among his late father’s papers. It warned him against pursuing me and mentioned Vanessa’s assurance that “the matter was settled.” Gregory said he had never seen it before. He had believed every word Vanessa told him and had never once asked me whether any of it was true. “You could have found me,” I said. “Yes,” he replied. “I should have tried harder.”
Then my phone rang. The caller introduced herself as Elena Ruiz, a former employee of the Vance family office who had processed some of the transfers. Vanessa had told her to route the money through a protected account, supposedly so the press could never find me. Elena had kept copies of every instruction. But there was something else that frightened her. Only last month, she said, she had seen Richard Pryce walking out of the family office, very much alive.
Gregory stared at the phone. “I attended his memorial service.” “Did you see him there?” I asked. He had not. The casket had been closed, and Vanessa had handled every arrangement. He had simply taken the family’s word for it.
We decided not to wait any longer. That night, snow began falling lightly over the city as Gregory drove Owen and me to the Vance house in Brookline. Flakes dissolved against the windshield, and nobody spoke.
Vanessa opened the door. She had been crying, but when she saw Owen standing on the porch behind me, her face hardened into something I recognized at once: fear dressed up as anger. “You shouldn’t have brought him here.”
“He has more right to be here than anyone,” Gregory said quietly, and stepped past her into the hall.
Miles sat halfway down the staircase, still in the navy blazer he had worn to the ceremony, as if he had forgotten to change. He looked at Owen, then quickly looked away.
I laid Elena’s copies on the hall table beside the photograph. “You opened an account in my name. You took the letters. You let him believe I wanted nothing from him.”
Vanessa’s hands trembled. “I was afraid. You don’t understand what this family is like. If Gregory had gone back to you, Miles and I would have had nothing.”
“Fear can explain a choice,” I said. “It doesn’t erase what that choice did to other people.”
Owen stepped forward. His voice was steady, but I could see his pulse jumping at his throat. “Who was the child meant to be?”
Vanessa’s eyes went to Miles on the stairs. Her lips parted, but nothing came out.
A door opened at the end of the hallway. An old man in a gray cardigan stepped out of the study, leaning on the frame, his white hair thin beneath the lamplight.
“Don’t answer that, Vanessa,” said Richard Pryce.
Gregory went white. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
The old man looked at him over his wire-rimmed glasses. “I was supposed to be a great many things, Gregory. Sit down. You’re about to find out what your father’s money really bought.”
