They Threw a Baby Shower for His Mistress in My House novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Other Son

Gabe shows her his father's will with the same notary stamp, tells her to check where she was at the time the journal says she signed, bandages her hand and names the gala as Diane's stage, and then Carlton texts that Jessa is bleeding in Claire's own ER.

I did not take the paper from him right away.

"Why should I believe you?" I said. "You're his brother."

"Half brother. And you've been told for six years that I'm bitter."

"Are you?"

"Yes," Gabe said. "That doesn't make the stamp fake."

He unfolded the paper against the hood of his truck.

It was a photocopy of a will, eleven years old, with a blue notary stamp at the bottom.

The name on the stamp matched the one on my phone, letter for letter.

I held the phone up beside it, and neither of us said anything for a moment.

"My father signed that will in a hospice bed," he said. "He couldn't lift a pen by then. Diane brought her notary to the room, and when I came back from my shift, I was out of everything."

"The house, too?"

"The house, the land, the savings. All of it to his wife, effective the day he died."

"And nobody asked how a man who couldn't hold a pen signed his name?"

"I asked. The notary's journal said I'd been in the room and agreed, and I hadn't been."

His mouth went flat.

"The journal is the thing. A notary writes down every signer, the time, the place and what ID they showed."

I looked at the deed on my phone and then at him.

"Where were you at three in the afternoon on the fourteenth?" he said.

"I was at work."

"All day?"

"Seven to seven. I swipe a badge at the unit door every time I walk in. It logs me to the minute."

"The notary's journal entry for your signature says three-ten, at an office in Dublin. I paid a clerk for a copy of the page."

The parking garage was cold, and I realized I'd stopped feeling my hands.

"I was never in Dublin on my birthday," I said. "I was giving a man his chemo."

"Then somebody wrote you into that journal who wasn't there."

I closed my fist, and it hurt.

I opened it and looked.

There was a thin cut across the middle of my palm where the setting of the moonstone had dug in, and a line of blood ran down my wrist.

I had been holding the necklace for almost twelve hours.

"Give me that," Gabe said.

He reached into the truck and came out with a red bag marked with a white cross.

"I'm fine."

"It's a first aid kit, not a proposal."

I held out my hand.

His fingers were warm and dry, and he took my wrist with the care he must have used on strangers all day.

He wiped the cut with a pad and pressed gauze down with his thumb on the heel of my hand.

His thumb stayed there a second longer than the gauze needed.

I noticed it and told myself I hadn't.

"Does it hurt?" he said.

"Not as much as it should."

"That's the shock. It'll catch up with you around four."

He taped the gauze and let go.

I kept my hand open in front of me for a moment, because the place where his thumb had been was still warm.

"Mrs. Weatherby," he said.

"Claire."

"Claire. There's something you should know about where Diane is going to be in nine days."

"Where?"

"The Riverbend Foundation gala. She's chair. The board, the donors and every department head will be in one ballroom, and she's giving the opening speech."

I thought of my charge nurse and her careful voice, and the three million people who had watched me drop a dessert.

"You want me to crash her gala."

"I want you to walk in the front door like a person with every right to be there, because you will be one."

"I'm on leave."

"You're on paid leave from a hospital that Diane cannot fire you from, and your badge still works."

I looked at the gray truck, the scrape on his knuckles and the folded will.

"And what do you get out of it?"

He took a moment before he answered.

"A chance to watch her find out what it feels like," he said.

It wasn't the whole answer, and I knew it.

It was the first honest sentence anyone in that family's orbit had given me in a long time.

My phone buzzed against the gauze.

Carlton.

I almost let it ring out, and then the text came through in a long gray block.

"Claire, Jessa is bleeding. We're at the Riverbend ER. I know you're in the building. Please. I'm scared."

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