Chapter 6 - The Unraveling Family
My mother's carefully controlled, elegant expression finally shattered into raw, ugly anger.
"Are you truly willing to destroy this entire family over that outsider woman, Ethan?!" she hissed, her fingers clenching into tight fists at her sides.
I stared at my mother—the woman who had raised me, the woman I had trusted my entire life—and felt a profound, sickening horror.
"What did Claire discover, Evelyn?" I asked softly, my voice dropping into a lethal calm. "What did she find in this house while I was away?"
My mother said nothing. Her lips pressed into a tight, pale line.
That absolute silence told me everything I needed to know.
The night before, during our final video call, Claire had mentioned something strange in passing.
She had been looking for old baby photo albums in my late father's locked private study on the third floor.
She had managed to open an antique desk drawer that had been stuck for years.
Inside, she found thick stacks of offshore property transfers, corporate asset reassignments bearing Nathan's signature, and a handwritten letter my father had written weeks before his sudden, unexpected heart attack two years ago.
At the time, I had dismissed it as standard family inheritance paperwork.
But Claire had sounded deeply unsettled over the camera.
Before we hung up, she had looked directly into the lens with serious, frightened eyes and said:
"Ethan... if something strange happens before your flight lands tomorrow, promise me you won't believe the first story your mother tells you."
I had laughed it off. I told her she was let her pregnancy hormones make her paranoid.
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Now she was lying in a velvet-lined coffin in our living room.
Drugged. Paralysed. Eight months pregnant.
