A Promise Made Before the Funeral
Chapter 02 - A Promise Made Before the Funeral
The ambulance came with its lights flashing through the ornamental iron gates. Emma tried to stand without help, insisting that she could walk, but the paramedic gently asked her to remain seated while he assessed her. Adrian stepped aside. He was accustomed to controlling every room he entered; for once, all he could do was let trained people work.
Vanessa stood near the stairs, making calls she ended whenever he looked toward her. Daniel quietly asked his employer whether he wanted the luggage secured. Adrian nodded. "Photograph everything. Preserve the camera footage. And keep that suitcase locked somewhere safe."
"You're treating a housemaid like a witness against me," Vanessa said.
"I'm treating her like an injured woman who needs help."
Vanessa's expression hardened. "Rose's memory deserves better."
He didn't answer. Rose's memory had become Vanessa's most reliable weapon. Any question about their marriage, the sudden rearrangement of Rose's belongings, or the records of her death could be shut down with that sentence.
At the hospital, doctors reassured Emma that her baby had a heartbeat and that there was no immediate evidence of premature labor. They wanted continued observation because of the stress and abdominal pain. Emma asked Adrian to wait outside while they examined her. He agreed without protest.
When she finally invited him in, he brought no lawyer, no bodyguard, and no demand. He stood beside the door until she told him to sit.
"Rose was my half-sister," she began. "We had the same mother, but I grew up with my grandmother in Ohio. Our mother made arrangements she thought would give us both safer lives. We didn't meet until I was eighteen."
Adrian remembered Rose talking about a younger sister whose identity she hoped to protect. He'd assumed that sister was estranged, perhaps imaginary in the sense that people sometimes build families out of longing. He had never pressed her.
"Why take a job in my house under another surname?"
"Sullivan was our mother's name. I didn't hide that. Nobody asked me whether I knew Rose."
"Why didn't you come directly to me?"
Emma looked at the window. "Because Rose warned me that somebody close to you was stealing from the family foundation. She believed that person had learned what she knew. She told me never to trust a message sent in your name unless I heard your voice myself."
"And the child?"
Emma wiped her eyes. "Rose told me she was pregnant shortly before she disappeared from our calls. Months later, Vanessa said she had miscarried before she died. I never saw a death certificate for a baby. I kept asking. Everyone stopped answering."
Adrian stared at the floor. The night Rose died, he had been called to a warehouse fire on the south side. By the time he reached the private hospital, Vanessa, then his family's legal adviser, had told him there was nothing to see. He'd been handed a sealed medical summary and directed toward a funeral.
He remembered signing documents while medicated and exhausted. He remembered Vanessa guiding his hand.
Emma took the hospital photograph from a transparent evidence sleeve Daniel had delivered. "I wasn't trying to steal the dress. It was in a storage trunk with Rose's letters. I found it today while cataloging the old nursery. Someone had pushed the trunk behind a false wall."
"What was in the letters?"
"Warnings. And one name: Miriam."
Adrian looked up. "Miriam who?"
Emma shook her head. "I don't know. But Rose wrote, 'If I disappear, Miriam knows where the child went.'"
Adrian sat completely still. Outside, an ambulance reversed beneath the emergency entrance.
May you like
A child.
He had spent three years mourning a woman and a future he had been told were gone. Now the future might have a name and a place, and someone had worked hard to keep both from him.
