Chapter 5 - The brother who did not exist
His name was Nathaniel Rowan.
Born nineteen months after Caleb.
No family photographs.
No school records under Rowan.
No mention from Lorraine.
Caleb thought the trust was fraudulent.
Then DNA records confirmed Charles Rowan had another biological son.
Caleb confronted his mother.
For the first time, Lorraine lost control.
“Nathan is irrelevant.”
“A brother is irrelevant?”
“He isn't part of this family.”
“Why?”
She refused to answer.
Caleb demanded to know where Nathan was.
Lorraine laughed.
“You've already met him.”
That sentence followed us home.
Elias?
A business associate?
Someone at the hospital?
Detective Cole warned us not to chase theories.
Then Caleb remembered the photograph Lorraine sent him.
Dr. Morgan outside our townhouse.
Do not return home yet. She is about to tell you everything.
Maybe “everything” wasn't an affair.
Maybe Lorraine wanted Caleb to believe it was.
Elias agreed to DNA testing.
No relation.
Dead end.
Then investigators found Lorraine’s payments.
For twenty-nine years, she had sent money through a trust to a man named Nathan Pierce.
Address:
Asheville, North Carolina.
Caleb drove there with Detective Cole.
I stayed beside Grace.
The address belonged to a rehabilitation center.
Nathan Pierce had died eighteen months earlier.
No wife.
No children.
If Nathan was dead, Grace’s birth made the trust’s transfer almost inevitable.
Lorraine couldn't redirect it to him.
So what was she doing?
Then the center administrator gave Caleb a box Nathan left behind.
Inside were photographs.
Letters.
And a sealed DNA test.
Nathan knew Charles Rowan was his father.
But the DNA report contained another result.
Lorraine Rowan was not Nathan’s mother.
Caleb called me from Asheville.
“If Mom didn't give birth to him, why did she hide him?”
I didn't know.
Then I looked again at the trust clause Detective Cole had left with me.
The language didn't say control passed to Lorraine’s second son.
It passed to:
The surviving issue of Charles Rowan’s second recognized lineage.
Not Lorraine’s.
Charles’s.
We had interpreted it incorrectly.
Nathan being dead did not eliminate the claim.
If Nathan had a child somewhere, Grace might not control the entire fortune.
And someone had gone to extraordinary lengths to make Caleb question Grace's paternity before anyone discovered who Nathan’s heir was.
That evening, a woman entered Grace’s NICU.
She wasn't family.
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She wasn't staff.
And she was carrying Nathan Pierce’s photograph.
