Chapter 17 - Brooke’s Apartment
Julian Cross smiled at Brooke and asked whether I had ever influenced Grant’s decisions about Lydia’s trust, which told us exactly how he planned to weaponize me.
We met Brooke at her apartment that same night. She was badly shaken, still in office clothes, hands wrapped around a mug she clearly wasn’t drinking from. Eli swept the apartment first. Grant stood near the window. I sat across from Brooke while Dawson put his phone on record with her consent.
“He came alone?” Grant asked.
“Yes,” Brooke said. “He said he only wanted clarity because the press was about to get ‘confused stories.’”
“What exactly did he ask?” Dawson prompted.
Brooke took a breath. “He asked whether you had ever amended Lydia’s trust because of Tessa’s involvement in Noah’s life. He asked whether you had ever discussed making Tessa a guardian, trustee, or beneficiary.” She looked at me apologetically. “I told him absolutely not.”
I felt equal parts relieved and insulted.
“Then what?” I asked.
“He said that wasn’t what he’d heard.”
Grant’s face changed by a degree. “From whom?”
“He wouldn’t say. Then he mentioned that sometimes lonely widowers make emotional legal choices because staff become ‘indispensable.’”
I shut my eyes for a second.
There it was. The architecture of the lie.
Not just that I cared too much for Noah, but that I had leveraged that care to influence Grant’s estate planning. Rich-man scandal. Household betrayal. Child at the center. Exactly the kind of story tabloids loved and public sympathy hated.
Brooke continued, “When I told him he was lying, he smiled and said, ‘Then you may want to revisit the draft from the study.’”
No one in the room moved.
Dawson asked quietly, “The trust amendment draft?”
“Yes.”
“Did he indicate he had seen it?”
“He spoke as if he knew its contents.”
Grant’s jaw set hard. “He had no right.”
That was almost beside the point now. The bigger truth was motive. Vivienne’s side cared about the trust because they wanted access to its symbolic and practical power—not necessarily to alter it directly, but to distort any relationship around Noah into something financial.
Dawson asked Brooke one more important question. “Did you ever discuss that draft with anyone outside privileged work?”
“No.”
“Not Vivienne?”
“Never.”
Then the only way Julian knew enough to ask was through access inside the study—or through Vivienne herself after entering it.
As we left Brooke’s building, Grant said, “The amendment draft only tightened asset protections for Noah if I remarried.”
I turned to him. “Meaning?”
“It placed more control with independent trustees. Less with a future spouse.”
The pieces slid together with sickening precision.
Vivienne had reason to resent Noah personally, reason to resent me as a protective barrier, and reason to care about trust language that limited her future influence.
She didn’t need to want the child dead. She only needed to see him as an obstacle to power.
Back at the car, Ruiz called with news that turned the knife another way. “Anton is asking for a lawyer-protected proffer,” she said. “He wants limited immunity in exchange for information.”
Dawson answered before Grant could. “On what subject?”
“Break-in, evidence theft, possible tampering, and communications with Julian and Vivienne.”
Grant looked at me. “He’s talking.”
“Because he’s scared,” I said.
“Good.”
Ruiz paused. “There’s a catch. He refuses to speak if Ms. Cross is charged alone. He says ‘the older woman’ is involved too.”
Older woman.
I thought immediately of Julian’s mother.
Grant’s eyes went cold. “Evelyn Cross?”
Ruiz said, “He didn’t give a name. But yes, likely.”
The story expanded again. Not only siblings. A family front.
And suddenly I remembered something from weeks earlier: Evelyn Cross standing in the nursery doorway after a charity brunch, looking at Noah with a smile that never reached her eyes, saying, “Children are adorable until they become expensive little kings.”
At the time it had sounded merely cruel.
May you like
Now it sounded like philosophy.
📖 Julian’s questions exposed the inheritance smear as a calculated plan—but Anton’s offer to talk came with a shock: he says an older Cross family member was involved too. 👇
