Chapter 9 - The Friend Who Wanted Me Alive
Police issued a fraud alert connected to Ethan.
I wanted an arrest warrant.
Instead, Ethan walked into the precinct voluntarily.
With an attorney.
And handed over everything.
His laptop.
Emails.
Recordings.
Financial logs.
Even the device used to clone my corporate authentication token.
“I didn’t change your life insurance,” he said.
“Your name is on it.”
“Exactly.”
“Why would someone frame you?”
“To make you look in the wrong direction.”
Again.
Everyone in this story wanted me looking somewhere else.
Ethan admitted working with Maya.
He had helped create Northstar.
He suspected Eleanor was financially abusing my accounts.
But he hid it from me because Maya believed I would defend my mother.
She was right.
Then Ethan discovered Thomas Vance contacting Eleanor.
He began pretending to cooperate with them.
“You could have told me.”
“You were in Germany because I sent you there.”
“What?”
“The inspection could have waited.”
My best friend had deliberately removed me from New York.
I grabbed his shirt.
“Why?”
“To keep you alive.”
Silence.
Thomas Vance’s messages contained references to a “New Year resolution.”
Ethan initially thought it meant completing the guardianship fraud before January.
Then he intercepted another message:
D.M. must not return before midnight.
D.M.
David Mercer.
The plan required me gone.
Permanently?
Ethan wasn’t sure.
He sent himself back to New York, infiltrated Eleanor’s plan and attempted to collect evidence.
“But Maya nearly died.”
His face changed.
“I know.”
“You watched my mother abuse her.”
“I thought I could expose them before—”
“Before what?”
He had no answer good enough.
There rarely is.
Good intentions become ugly when they start treating people as acceptable collateral.
I released him.
“You don't get to call yourself her protector.”
“I know.”
Then he gave detectives the recording that changed everything.
Thomas speaking to Eleanor.
“If David comes back, the structure collapses.”
Eleanor:
“He won’t.”
Thomas:
“You sound certain.”
My mother laughed.
“I raised him. I know exactly what makes my son stay away.”
That was not a murder confession.
But then another voice entered.
Female.
“You're both assuming David is the problem.”
Chloe listened to the recording.
Her face drained.
“That's not Mom.”
“Who is it?”
She looked toward Maya.
Maya knew.
“Rebecca.”
Her biological mother.
Rebecca had been in the hospital with us for hours.
May you like
And when I turned toward the chair where she had been sitting—
it was empty.
