Chapter 7 - The Girl Named Claire
Caroline could not have predicted my name.
Unless Claire was not originally my name.
My mother arrived at the house forty minutes later.
Susan Bennett looked as though she had aged ten years since yesterday’s wedding.
I placed the cassette in front of her.
“Explain.”
She listened.
Then sat down.
“Claire was Caroline’s name for her daughter.”
“But Caroline had a son.”
Susan shook her head.
“The file is wrong.”
The live-birth record in the chest had been altered.
Caroline delivered a girl.
Not a boy.
She named her Claire.
My throat closed.
“I’m thirty-one.”
“The baby would be thirty-five.”
“I know.”
“Then who was she?”
Susan looked at Ethan.
His face tightened.
“No.”
She continued.
Caroline’s daughter lived four years.
Her name was Claire Bennett.
She died in a house fire.
My aunt disappeared permanently afterward.
Four months later, my mother became pregnant with me.
“When I had you, Caroline contacted me.”
For the first time in years.
She asked Susan to name me Claire.
“Why?”
“She said if anything happened to her, someone needed to remember that name.”
My identity wasn’t stolen.
I wasn’t secretly Caroline’s child.
Something emotionally stranger had happened.
I had been named for a dead cousin nobody told me existed.
“And you agreed?”
“I loved her.”
“You also let me marry into the family she spent her life running from.”
Susan cried.
“I thought Robert’s secrets died with him.”
Then Ethan asked:
“What happened in the fire?”
Susan looked away.
That was the next lie.
The fire was officially accidental.
Caroline never believed it.
Her daughter had been staying in a protected residence connected to Hawthorne.
Only four people knew the address.
Caroline.
Susan.
Robert.
And Margaret.
I turned slowly toward my mother-in-law.
Margaret stood.
“I never told anyone.”
Susan snapped:
“Caroline believed you did.”
“I didn't!”
The room erupted.
For once, Ethan shouted louder than both.
“STOP.”
Silence.
He looked broken.
“My wife woke up with her blood on our wedding veil. I have a hospital band with the name of a baby who may or may not be me. There’s a dead child whose name Claire has carried her whole life. Stop arguing about thirty-five years ago and tell us what happened LAST NIGHT.”
He was right.
We had let old mysteries distract us from the immediate danger.
I looked at Susan.
“Why was my blood on the veil?”
She didn’t know.
Margaret claimed she didn’t either.
Ethan did.
He went upstairs and returned with a small plastic evidence bag.
Inside was a hypodermic needle.
My stomach dropped.
“I found this beside you in the wine room.”
“Did you inject me?”
“No.”
“Margaret?”
“No.”
“Susan?”
“I wasn’t here.”
Then whose?
Ethan said the emergency-room doctor found a sedative in my blood.
A medication I had never been prescribed.
Someone drugged me on my wedding night.
Then Susan looked at the needle.
Her face drained completely.
“What?”
She whispered:
“That medication was used at Hawthorne.”
Thirty-five years ago.
And only one person from the old clinic still had legal access to it.
May you like
Caroline Bennett.
My supposedly vanished aunt.
