Chapter 2
For several agonizing seconds, I couldn’t find my voice. “Told me what?”
Evelyn looked down at the children. The older twin opened his eyes, staring at me with an expression so intensely familiar that my chest physically ached.
“Their names are Leo and Toby,” she said softly.
“How old are they?”
“Five.”
I dropped to my knees on the cold airport floor. “Are they mine?”
Evelyn nodded once.
She reached into her scuffed tote bag and pulled out a stack of papers bound together with a thick rubber band: unopened letters addressed to my office in Chicago—all stamped RETURN TO SENDER—copies of emails sent to an old account I had stopped using, and a cashier’s check for $60,000 signed in my mother’s elegant handwriting.
“Your mother offered me this check to disappear,” Evelyn said, her voice dropping into an icy whisper. “I refused it. Three days later, she told me you already knew about the pregnancy and that you wanted nothing to do with us.”
I went deathly pale. “That… I never knew, Evelyn. I swear to God I never knew.”
“I see that now,” she whispered.
Evelyn added that three days after that conversation, her apartment lease was abruptly canceled by her landlord, and my family’s corporate attorney formally served her with a notice warning that any further attempt to contact me would be treated as harassment and extortion.
“Why are you back in Chicago now?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
Evelyn pointed up at the departure monitor. “Because your mother found us again.”
My phone suddenly vibrated violently in my hand.
MOTHER Calling…
When I slid the screen to answer, Eleanor spoke without even offering a greeting. “Marcus, do not believe a single word that woman says to you.”
I slowly stood up, looking around the terminal. “How do you know I’m standing with her?”
Evelyn was staring behind me, her eyes wide with terror.
Standing fifty yards away across the concourse was my mother, Eleanor Vance, flanked by Raymond Vance—our family’s senior corporate counsel. Raymond was holding a thick gray legal folder.
Stamped across the front cover were two names:
May you like
LEO VANCE MONTGOMERY
TOBY VANCE MONTGOMERY
