Chapter 4 - THE WOMAN BEFORE LYDIA
“Nora who?” Officer Grant asked.
Celeste looked like she wanted to take the question back.
Too late.
“Nora Whitman,” she said. “I saw the name on old insurance files in Adrian’s office. I thought maybe she was a client.”
Adrian’s voice came out low and dangerous. “Stop talking.”
Celeste looked at him, and something inside her finally broke.
“No,” she said. “No, I’m done.”
She turned to the officers.
“He told me Lydia was unstable. He told me Evelyn was paranoid. He said all his exes turned into problems because they were too emotional to appreciate what he gave them.”
I laughed once.
The sound shocked even me.
“What he gave us,” I said, “was the slow education of terror.”
By then, the journal had already given the officers enough to keep digging.
Lydia had written about another woman who came before her—Nora Whitman, briefly engaged to Adrian eight years before Lydia entered the picture.
Nora died in what the Hawthorne family had always described as a tragic boating accident.
But there, between shaky pages, Lydia had written:
Margaret called Nora “practice.”
I felt nauseated.
Officer Grant got a search judge on emergency call within the hour. By midnight, the Hawthorne home was no longer a mansion.
It was a crime scene.
Officers spread through the estate. Financial investigators were notified. The hidden room beneath the shed was sealed. A second team began tracing the payments to the North Carolina recovery center.
Then the call came.
Not from a hospital.
Not from a morgue.
From that same recovery center.
A nurse had seen the Hawthorne name mentioned over police radio traffic and quietly contacted local authorities. There was a long-term patient under guardianship whose description matched Lydia.
Alive.
Drugged for years.
Buried legally, not physically.
Margaret sat down so hard I thought her bones might crack.
Adrian shut his eyes.
Charles whispered, “This can still be handled.”
I turned to him.
“That,” I said, “is exactly what you told yourselves every time a woman became inconvenient.”
By dawn, I was taken to the hospital for monitoring after the allergic shock. An officer remained outside my room.
I expected sleep.
Instead, I got another twist.
Officer Grant visited with a folder.
“We pulled the preliminary life insurance records,” he said. “Lydia had a policy. So did Nora. And six months after your wedding, Adrian filed paperwork to increase yours.”
I stared at him.
“For how much?”
He opened the folder.
“Ten million dollars.”
I thought the room could not get colder.
Then he added, “And someone tried to expedite the payout tonight by electronically flagging you as deceased.”
I looked up sharply.
“From where?”
He met my eyes.
May you like
“From inside this hospital.”
Cliffhanger: Adrian’s family had help beyond the estate—and someone inside the hospital had already tried to mark me dead before sunrise.
