Chapter 6
The next morning, I woke to war.
Isaac had released a statement through his publicist, claiming the relationship had “grown complicated” and that the wedding exposure had been a “private matter turned public by heightened emotion.”
Heightened emotion.
I laughed so hard I nearly choked.
My father did not laugh.
By noon, the Hart legal team had frozen every pending merger, investment, and shared venture involving the Gerald family.
Board members started distancing themselves from Isaac publicly.
Investors panicked.
The Gerald stock price began to slide.
Then Isaac called.
Once.
Twice.
Ten times.
I blocked him.
He used another number.
Then another.
Finally, my mother answered one of them on speaker.
“Mrs. Hart,” Isaac’s mother began shakily, “we need to resolve this quietly—”
My mother cut her off with surgical precision.
“Quietly? Your son tried to destroy my daughter on a livestream watched by half the city.”
“Please—”
“No. Listen carefully. There will be no marriage. No alliance. No quiet resolution. And if your son contacts Caroline again, I will have every lawyer in this country standing on your doorstep by morning.”
She ended the call and handed the phone back to me.
My father, seated across from us, lifted his coffee cup and said, “I married the right woman.”
Under any other circumstances, I might have laughed.
But my mind had snagged on something else.
A name.
Evelyn.
I had heard it before, not just as Floyd’s old love, not just from whispers in our circle.
Something older.
Something that scraped against a locked door in my memory.
I went upstairs and opened the cedar trunk at the back of my closet.
Inside were the things I had never been able to throw away after Nathan died.
His watch.
His debate ribbons.
A stack of old notebooks.
And, at the very bottom, the journal he had kept during his last year of high school.
I sat on the floor and began to flip through it.
Page after page, one name appeared over and over.
Evelyn Cross.
My breath caught.
My brother had loved her.
I read until my eyes blurred.
Nathan’s handwriting was neat and familiar, alive in a way that made my chest ache.
Evelyn made me laugh again today.
Evelyn hates strawberries but eats them anyway when Caroline steals them off her plate.
I’m going to introduce Evelyn to Mom and Dad after finals.
Every mention was tender.
Hopeful.
Real.
This was not some passing crush.
Nathan had loved her deeply.
And I had never known.
At the time, I had only been fifteen, too wrapped in my own dramas to notice much beyond myself. Then Nathan died suddenly in what everyone said was a drunk-driving accident, and our entire family had shattered.
I closed the journal slowly.
Mia, sitting across from me, frowned. “What is it?”
I swallowed.
“Evelyn was Nathan’s girlfriend.”
Her eyes widened.
“What?”
I nodded.
“And after he died, she disappeared. My family never met her. Not once.”
A chill spread through me.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
I thought back to the wedding.
To Isaac’s obsession with Floyd.
To Evelyn’s return.
To the timing.
To the rage in Isaac’s eyes every time my brother’s name had ever come up over the years.
I stood so suddenly the journal slid from my lap.
“Mia, I need everything we have on Evelyn.”
That same day, I hired a private investigator.
By evening, I was also on the phone with two of Nathan’s old classmates.
One remembered Evelyn clearly.
“She was pretty, quiet at first. Then suddenly all over Nathan. Everybody thought they were disgustingly sweet together.”
Another hesitated before saying, “Didn’t she have some kind of heart condition? I remember people saying she was really sick back then.”
My grip tightened around the phone.
A heart condition.
A strange heaviness settled in my stomach.
After Nathan died, many of his organs had been donated. That much I knew.
My parents had made the decision because he had signed the donor papers himself.
I had never wanted to think about where those pieces of him went.
But now I did.
I called the hospital.