Chapter 16 - Rebecca’s Last Call
Naomi searched public records through the night.
Rebecca Sloan had died six years earlier in a boating accident.
She was twenty-seven.
Pregnant.
Married to Julian’s cousin, Daniel Vale.
The official report said she fell overboard after drinking.
No body was recovered for three days.
The medical examiner was Dr. Samuel Keene.
Again.
Keene admitted Beatrice pressured him to alter the toxicology results.
Rebecca had not been drinking.
She had been sedated.
Why?
Because Rebecca discovered Beatrice’s maternity-resolution system.
She planned to expose it.
Naomi found an old cloud backup linked to Rebecca’s email.
One audio file remained.
Rebecca whispered from inside a bathroom.
“Naomi, I don’t know if you’ll ever hear this. We have the same father.”
Naomi covered her mouth.
Rebecca continued.
“Judge Sloan used Beatrice to hide his families. She controls him because she knows how many identities he created.”
The recording shifted.
A door slammed.
Beatrice’s voice entered.
“You should not have opened that ledger.”
Rebecca replied, “You’re hurting pregnant women.”
“I’m protecting inheritances.”
“You’re a monster.”
The audio ended with a struggle.
Then water.
The boating accident was murder.
Naomi took the recording to federal prosecutors.
Sloan was already in custody.
When confronted with Rebecca’s voice, he finally broke.
He admitted Beatrice had arranged the death.
He also admitted he signed the false report afterward to protect himself.
In exchange for a plea, he revealed a storage facility holding original records.
Agents raided it.
Inside were files on nine women.
Pregnant wives.
Mistresses.
Heirs.
Each woman had been threatened, institutionalized, financially destroyed, or killed when she endangered a property transfer.
I was number ten.
Vanessa was number eleven.
The conspiracy was not built around me.
I was simply the first woman to survive long enough to expose it.
One file contained surveillance photographs of me from college.
Julian had been watching me two years before we met.
Another contained letters Beatrice wrote to matchmakers, private investigators, and fertility doctors.
My marriage had been designed like a corporate merger.
I felt grief.
Then anger.
Then something stronger.
Clarity.
The women in those files deserved more than my private justice.
I held a press conference.
Not as Julian’s abandoned wife.
As chairwoman of Mercer Holdings.
I named every victim with family permission.
I announced a legal fund for survivors of reproductive coercion and inheritance fraud.
The story became national.
Women began contacting investigators.
More evidence arrived.
More witnesses spoke.
Beatrice’s lawyers tried to suppress the files.
The court refused.
Then one letter arrived without a return address.
Inside was a photograph of Rebecca alive.
Taken three weeks after her supposed death.
Naomi stared at it.
On the back, Rebecca had written:
May you like
BEATRICE THINKS I’M DEAD. KEEP IT THAT WAY UNTIL CLAIRE WINS.
👉 Rebecca Sloan had survived the murder attempt, and her return could become the witness Beatrice feared more than any document.
