Chapter 6 - The Locked Nursery.
.Nick stood completely still while the meaning of the laboratory result settled over him.
Richard looked as if the floor had disappeared beneath his feet.
Vivian did not look surprised.
That was the worst part.
Nick turned toward her.
"Tell me the lab is wrong."
Vivian folded her hands.
"Tests make mistakes."
Richard's voice shook with rage.
"Not this kind of mistake."
Nick stepped closer to his mother.
"Who is my father?"
Vivian looked toward Adrian, who had arrived minutes earlier after Richard summoned him.
It was only a glance.
But Nick saw it.
So did Elena.
Adrian's face tightened.
Nick laughed once, a sound without humor.
"No."
Vivian said his name.
"Nick."
He backed away.
"No."
Richard looked between Vivian and Adrian, and thirty years of friendship seemed to rot in his expression.
"Is he yours?"
Adrian did not answer.
Richard crossed the room and struck him.
The blow knocked Adrian into a chair.
Elena pulled Lily closer, startled by the sudden violence.
Richard immediately stepped back, ashamed but still trembling.
Adrian touched his split lip.
"I loved her."
Nick stared at him.
"You loved her, so you let another man raise me?"
Adrian looked at Vivian.
"She said it was safer."
"For whom?"
No one answered.
Nick left the suite.
Elena almost followed, then remembered the driveway.
His pain did not erase hers.
That afternoon Richard returned to the mansion with Elena because Mara's papers referenced a room on the second floor.
The room had once been a nursery before Nick was born.
Vivian had kept it locked for decades.
The key was not on the household ring.
Richard ordered the lock drilled.
Inside, dust covered a small white crib, faded wallpaper, and boxes stacked beneath sheets.
Elena found her mother's handwriting on one cardboard lid.
MARA - RETURN.
Her heart stopped.
Richard stared at the label.
"I never saw these."
Inside were dresses, books, medical receipts, and dozens of letters addressed to Richard.
Every envelope had been opened.
None had been delivered.
Elena found a baby sweater halfway finished in pale yellow wool.
She pressed it to her mouth and cried silently.
Richard sat on the floor beside her.
"I am sorry."
Elena looked at him.
"You do not get to apologize once and become my father."
He nodded.
"I know."
That answer hurt because it was the first honest thing anyone had given her.
At the bottom of the box was a photograph of Mara standing outside a women's clinic with a nurse Elena did not recognize.
The date was eight years after Elena's birth.
Elena stared at it.
"My mother told me she never came back to Charleston."
Richard turned the photograph over.
An address was written on the back.
The address belonged to a private psychiatric facility that had closed fifteen years earlier.
Elena felt cold.
Before she could speak, Nick appeared in the doorway.
His face was grey with shock.
"I found something in Mom's safe."
May you like
He held up a recent bank statement.
For the last twelve years, Vivian Blackwood had been sending monthly payments to a woman named Mara Bennett.
