Chapter 3 - The Second Test
Maren called Harold Mercer from her locked office.
She did not mention the letter to anyone.
Not even her mother.
Harold answered on the second ring.
“Mrs. Hart?”
“How did you get that laboratory sheet?”
There was a pause.
“Elias Vale.”
Adrian’s grandfather.
The man who had founded Vale Maritime and controlled nearly everything the family possessed until his death.
Maren had always liked Elias.
Celestine had not.
“What did Elias know?”
“Not enough when you left,” Harold said. “Far more before he died.”
Maren sat down.
Harold explained that Elias had become suspicious after Celestine persuaded Adrian to cut Maren and Elodie out of his life.
Elias had quietly hired investigators.
At first, they found nothing.
Then an accounting audit uncovered payments from a Vale subsidiary to a private medical courier.
The dates matched Elodie’s DNA test.
“Who authorized the payments?”
Harold hesitated.
“Celestine.”
Maren’s hands went cold.
“Why?”
“That is what Elias wanted answered.”
Harold told her something else.
Three months before his death, Elias changed his estate plan.
A sealed provision transferred a major voting interest in Vale Maritime to the first confirmed biological child of Adrian Vale.
Until that child turned twenty-five, the child’s legal guardian would control those votes.
Maren understood immediately.
“If Elodie is Adrian’s daughter…”
“You would control a significant block of the company on her behalf.”
“And Celestine?”
“Would lose the control she expected to receive.”
Suddenly three years of cruelty had a motive.
But Harold warned her not to jump ahead.
They needed proof.
A fresh DNA test was arranged through an independent hospital in Portland.
Maren supplied Elodie’s sample.
Adrian’s sample was more complicated.
Elias had anticipated that.
Before his death, he had legally preserved a verified biological reference sample from Adrian from a previous medical procedure, along with chain-of-custody documentation.
The result arrived ten days later.
Probability of paternity: greater than 99.99%.
Maren stared at the page until tears blurred the numbers.
Not because she had doubted herself.
Because Elodie had spent three years without her father because someone had manufactured a lie.
Harold called that afternoon.
“There’s more.”
Maren almost laughed bitterly.
“Of course there is.”
“The fraudulent DNA report was only the beginning.”
His investigators had traced the supposed payments from Maren’s alleged lover.
The account belonged to a shell company.
That company was controlled through another entity.
And that entity led back to a Vale family trust administrator.
One who reported directly to Celestine.
“Why hasn’t she been arrested?”
“Because Elias wanted the entire structure documented before anyone moved against her.”
“And then he died.”
“Yes.”
Maren looked at Elodie coloring at the kitchen table.
“What do you need me to do?”
“Come to Massachusetts.”
“When?”
Harold’s answer stunned her.
“The morning of Adrian’s wedding.”
Maren stood.
“You want me to walk into his wedding with a paternity test?”
“No.”
Harold’s voice hardened.
“I want you there because Elias scheduled the reading of the sealed codicil for that morning.”
Maren went quiet.
“And Celestine knows?”
“She knows there is a codicil.”
“But she doesn’t know what it says.”
“No.”
May you like
Maren finally understood why Harold sounded afraid.
If Celestine had destroyed a family once to keep Elodie away from the Vale estate, she might do far worse when she discovered what Elodie’s existence could cost her.
