Chapter 3 - THE SON SHE WANTED ME TO FORGET
The following morning, I drove to the hospital.
Emily had insisted that she would be all right, but I could still see the bruises around her wrists. Her lip had been treated, and a nurse had wrapped her hands.
Before I left, she gave me Caleb's hospital room number.
“I don't want you to feel obligated,” she said. “You've already done more than I expected.”
“I'm not going because I feel obligated. I'm going because a little boy needs his mother.”
Caleb lay beneath a white hospital blanket, breathing through a small oxygen mask.
He was thin, with dark curls and enormous brown eyes. When he saw Emily enter the room, he tried to sit up.
“Mom!”
Emily rushed to his bedside and kissed his forehead.
“I'm here, sweetheart.”
“You said you'd come.”
“I know. I'm sorry.”
He looked past her at me.
“Who are you?”
“I'm Nathan. I work with your mom.”
Caleb studied me with the suspicion of a child who had learned that adults often made promises they couldn't keep.
“Are you going to send her away again?”
The question hit me harder than I expected.
“No,” I said. “I'm going to make sure nobody keeps her from you.”
His shoulders relaxed.
Emily looked down, fighting tears.
A doctor explained that Caleb had a serious but treatable condition. He needed specialized care and careful monitoring. The financial strain had forced Emily to take extra shifts, and she had been terrified of losing her job.
Victoria knew all of this.
She had also known Caleb's hospital visits were becoming more frequent.
Yet she had used that fear to control Emily.
When we were alone in the corridor, Emily finally told me something she had kept hidden.
“Mrs. Cole once offered to pay for Caleb's treatment,” she said. “She said she'd cover everything if I signed a document promising to remain available to your family whenever she needed me.”
“Did you sign it?”
“No. I asked to take it home first. After that, she stopped speaking to me unless she was giving an order.”
I felt sick.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
Emily looked at me gently, without accusation.
“Because she was your wife. And because I was afraid you would believe her instead of me.”
I had no answer.
Back at the mansion, Daniel had discovered that Victoria's brother Richard had contacted two financial institutions about a trust connected to the twins.
The requests were not approved, but they revealed a pattern.
Someone was testing how much control Victoria could obtain without my knowledge.
That afternoon, I reviewed our household security footage.
Several recordings had been deleted.
However, the system retained access logs showing that Victoria had entered the nursery late at night on multiple occasions while I was away.
The same dates matched unexplained changes in the twins' schedules and missing entries in their medical records.
Then the security manager found something else.
A camera near the service entrance had recorded Victoria meeting a man in a dark coat.
He handed her a thick envelope.
She handed him a small electronic device.
The exchange lasted less than thirty seconds.
I recognized the man immediately.
His name was Peter Sloan, a former administrative assistant at my company.
He had been dismissed six months earlier after confidential business files disappeared.
I had assumed the matter was settled.
Now he was meeting my wife in secret.
Daniel enlarged the footage.
“Do you know what was in that envelope?” he asked.
“No.”
“What did she give him?”
“I don't know.”
Then my phone rang.
It was Emily.
Her voice was trembling.
“Mr. Cole, I remembered something.”
“What is it?”
“Your wife asked me to photograph the twins' birth certificates a few days after they came home.”
“Why?”
“She said she needed copies for insurance.”
“And did you give them to her?”
“Yes.”
I closed my eyes.
Because suddenly, the pattern was becoming clear.
Victoria had sought guardianship authority.
She had attempted to change the trust administrator.
She had contacted someone who had previously stolen company information.
And now I knew she had been collecting my children's most sensitive documents.
I called Daniel.
“We need to find out exactly what my wife has been planning.”
He paused before answering.
“Nathan, there's one more thing.”
May you like
“What?”
“The trust company Richard controls was incorporated less than two months before your twins were born.”
