Chapter 4 - THE OTHER CLAIRE
The dead woman was named Erin Walsh.
We learned that forty-eight hours later.
Fingerprints taken during an old employment background check matched the unidentified prints preserved after the crash.
Erin was thirty-five.
No close family had reported her missing.
She had worked temporary administrative jobs.
One of them mattered.
She had spent six months working for Vanessa.
Not personally.
For a small property-management company Vanessa owned before marrying me.
Rebecca laid the employment record on her conference table.
“That's our first verified connection.”
Not proof Vanessa killed Erin.
Not proof Vanessa created the false identification.
A connection.
I had learned how dangerous it was to turn suspicion into certainty.
The crash itself had been investigated as an accident.
Erin was driving alone on a wet rural highway.
No obvious evidence of another vehicle.
The real irregularity came afterward.
Someone arrived at the hospital with Claire's identification documents.
The person said she was Erin's—supposedly Claire's—husband.
Daniel Carter.
Hospital surveillance from fourteen months earlier had been archived under the case.
The man wore a baseball cap.
He wasn't me.
But I knew him.
Vanessa's older brother.
Ethan Cole.
I had met Ethan twice.
Vanessa claimed they barely spoke.
Apparently, they spoke enough for him to impersonate me beside a dead woman's body.
Police were notified of the identity issue.
Rebecca made sure we stayed out of their way.
Then another answer arrived.
The death certificate hadn't been created as part of a murder plot.
It had been created after a real accidental death.
Someone exploited Erin's death to manufacture Claire's.
That distinction mattered.
The question became why.
Insurance seemed obvious.
But the fraudulent claim failed.
So what had they gained?
Rebecca found it in my company records.
I owned Carter Biomedical, a private medical-device firm.
Claire held twelve percent through our marital trust.
If she died, her voting interest transferred temporarily to me before passing into trusts for Lily and Noah.
If she merely disappeared, those shares remained legally complicated.
A death certificate simplified control.
Someone had wanted Claire legally dead.
And someone had wanted me to believe she was merely gone.
Two contradictory stories.
Why?
Because different people needed different versions.
Then Rachel found an old message on a tablet Noah used for games.
It was from Claire.
Sent the night she disappeared.
Noah had never opened it.
Sweetheart, if Daddy asks, tell him I love him. Don't believe Aunt Vanessa when she says I left because of you.
I sat staring at those words.
Noah hadn't been abandoned.
Neither had I.
Claire knew Vanessa was involved before she vanished.
May you like
And she'd tried to warn our son.
📖 Claire's forgotten message proved Vanessa had been manipulating the children from the beginning, but the next recovered message showed Claire had been hiding something from me too. 👇
