Chapter 4 - The Paper Trail
Two hours felt like two decades.
Wesley sat in the quiet library of his penthouse overlooking Central Park, oblivious to the stunning panoramic view of the city skyline. His ruined suit lay discarded on the bathroom floor, replaced by a dark sweater and trousers. A tumbler of scotch sat untouched on the mahogany desk in front of him.
At precisely 5:00 PM, his laptop chimed. An encrypted file arrived from Marcus Vance.
Wesley’s fingers hovered over the keyboard before he opened the document. Attached was a fifty-page dossier, complete with photographs, tax filings, address histories, and hospital records.
He opened the first photo.
It was a candid shot taken six months ago outside a small brick elementary school in Queens. Nina was standing near the entrance gates, wearing a faded winter coat, holding a thermos in one hand and adjusting the scarf around a young boy’s neck. Beside her stood the little girl in her yellow boots, laughing as she tried to catch snowflakes on her tongue.
Wesley stared at the boy’s face.
Leo Lawson. Age: Five years, eight months.
Clara Lawson. Age: Three years, ten months.
Wesley scrolled down frantically to the medical records section.
Leo had been born at Mount Sinai Hospital five months after Wesley left for California. The father’s name on the birth certificate was left blank.
Clara had been born two years later.
Wesley froze. He blinked, staring at the second birth certificate on the screen.
Clara Lawson. Father: Blank.
He re-read the dates. Clara was nearly four years old. That meant she had been conceived more than a year after Wesley and Nina had split up.
A strange, sickening knot twisted in Wesley’s stomach. Had Nina met someone else after he left? Had she tried to rebuild her life with another man, only for that man to abandon her too?
He phoned Marcus immediately.
“I’m reading the file,” Wesley said without greeting. “Who is the father of the little girl?”
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Marcus replied. “There’s no marriage record for Nina in any state. No cohabitation records, no joint bank accounts, no social media presence connecting her to any partner for the past five years. She’s been living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Astoria, Queens, for three years.”
“How is she surviving?” Wesley asked, his heart sinking. “What does she do?”
“She works as a part-time archivist for a small public library branch in Brooklyn,” Marcus said, reading from his own notes. “Making roughly forty-two thousand dollars a year. She also does freelance graphic design work from home at night to pay for childcare.”
Forty-two thousand dollars a year.
Wesley looked around his library. The rug beneath his feet cost more than her annual salary. The artwork on his wall could fund her children’s college educations ten times over.
“There’s one more thing, Wesley,” Marcus added softly. “I checked her financial records. Two years ago, she spent three months on unpaid medical leave. The girl—Clara—was born with a severe congenital heart defect. Tetralogy of Fallot. She had open-heart surgery when she was six months old.”
Wesley felt as though the floor had dropped out beneath him. “Surgery?”
“It was successful,” Marcus explained, “but the medical debt nearly bankrupted her. She’s been paying off hospital bills every single month. She works sixty hours a week between the library and freelancing just to keep up with the payment plans.”
Wesley lowered his phone, tears stinging the backs of his eyes.
While he was sitting in glass boardrooms negotiating multi-million-dollar buyouts, drinking ten-thousand-dollar wine with foreign investors, the woman he loved was sitting in a hospital waiting room alone, watching a machine pump blood through their children's veins, wondering how she was going to pay for the bandage on her daughter’s chest.
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And her little daughter had looked at him on Fifth Avenue and said: “That’s the man Mommy cries about every night.”
Wesley stood up, grabbed his coat, and walked out the door.
