Chapter 4 - THE DEAD MAN'S GHOST
By 9:00 PM, I arrived at my mother's private residence—a gated brownstone in Greenwich Village that Nathan had never been allowed to touch.
I sat at the oak desk in my mother's study, applying a cool compress to my face while reviewing the financial ledgers Marcus had retrieved from the company’s internal server.
As I scrolled through the offshore transfer logs linked to Celeste's private accounts, a strange anomaly caught my eye.
Every month for the past four years, a sum of fifty thousand dollars had been wired from a Vance & Co. shell account in the Cayman Islands to a private medical facility in Zurich, Switzerland.
The account holder wasn't Nathan. It wasn't Celeste.
The account was registered under the name Arthur Vance.
My hands froze on the keyboard. My breath hitched in my throat.
Arthur Vance was my father.
According to my mother, my father had died in a private plane crash off the coast of Maine when I was four years old. I had grown up with a single photograph of him on my nightstand—a smiling man in a navy blazer standing on the deck of a sailboat. There had been a funeral. There had been a headstone in the family plot.
I pulled open the desk drawer, retrieving my mother’s personal leather-bound diary from 1999. I flipped to the back pages, where a series of bank account numbers had been written in her sharp, elegant cursive.
The Cayman account number matched the diary exactly.
My father hadn't died twenty-five years ago. He was alive. And my mother had been secretly funding his existence in a Swiss facility until the day she died—a payment stream that Celeste had quietly taken over four years ago.
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My head spun. The betrayal was no longer just about Nathan's greed or Celeste's ambition. It reached back into the darkest corners of my childhood.
Why had my mother lied to me for twenty-five years? Why was my father hidden away in Zurich? And why was Celeste using company money to keep him quiet?
