Chapter 9: What Diane Left Behind
I showed Damon the message at breakfast.
Eli was still asleep.
The city was gray outside the windows, a low cloud cover that turned everything flat and quiet.
Damon read the message twice, set my phone on the table, and picked up his coffee.
"Where did this come from?" I asked.
"I don't know the number."
"But you know what it means."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Yes."
I waited.
"Diane Mercer," he said.
"We were together for two years.
I told you about her at the river — that she was with me for what I could provide, not who I was." He set the coffee down.
"What I didn't tell you is that when I ended things with her, she didn't accept it.
She spent the next year trying to find ways back in.
Business channels, social channels, mutual contacts." He paused.
"When I married you, she escalated."
"What does escalate mean in this context?"
"She hired someone to investigate our marriage.
Looking for anything she could use." His jaw tightened.
"She found a financial irregularity in a property deal I'd done two years before we met.
It was a legitimate transaction, but the structure was complex enough to look questionable out of context.
She threatened to take it to the financial press unless I agreed to a private settlement."
I stared at him.
"You were being blackmailed."
"Yes."
"While we were married."
"Yes."
I sat back.
"And you didn't tell me."
"I was handling it." He looked at me.
"I know how that sounds."
"It sounds like you made a decision about what I needed to know and what I didn't." My voice was even.
"The same way you made a decision that night about what you felt and what you didn't."
He didn't flinch from that.
"You're right."
"Is it resolved?
The blackmail?"
"My legal team reached a settlement eighteen months ago.
She signed a non-disclosure.
She's not supposed to contact me or anyone connected to me."
"Then this message is a violation of that agreement."
"Yes."
"Which means she's either desperate or she wants you to know she's still watching." I looked at the phone on the table.
"Or she wants me to know."
Damon looked at me steadily.
"She may have been the one who tipped off the journalist."
I absorbed this.
"So the article, the timing of it, the fact that it appeared right after you found me—"
"It's possible she's been monitoring my search.
Waiting for the moment I got close." He paused.
"I can't prove it yet.
But Carter is looking."
I stood up and went to the window.
Below us, the city was starting to move — taxis, pedestrians, the first delivery trucks of the morning.
Four years ago I had fled this city because one man's words had broken something essential in me.
Now I was standing in the same building, and the complications were multiplying rather than shrinking.
"I need you to tell me everything," I said.
"Not the managed version.
Not what you think I can handle.
Everything."
"Claire—"
"Nora." I turned around.
"And I mean it, Damon.
If I'm going to stand next to you while you make a public statement about our son, I need to know what I'm standing next to.
All of it."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "Sit down."
I sat.
He told me everything.
The property deal, in full detail.
The settlement with Diane.
The private investigator she had hired who had, it turned out, been feeding information to three different parties over two years.
The fact that Damon's own security team had identified a leak inside his company six months ago — someone who had been passing his search records to an outside contact.
"The leak inside your company," I said slowly.
"Is it connected to Diane?"
"We think so.
We haven't confirmed it yet."
"So someone inside your organization has been watching you search for me.
For how long?"
"At least two years."
I looked at him.
"And that person may have told Diane when you found me."
"Yes."
"Which means Diane may have been the one who called the journalist."
"Yes."
"And the message to my phone last night was her telling you she's not finished."
He met my eyes.
"Yes."
I thought about Eli asleep in the next room.
About the gray stone on his nightstand.
About the life I had built out of nothing in a small town where nobody asked questions.
"Find the leak," I said.
"Today.
And find out if it was Diane who called Melissa Harte.
Because if it was, that NDA violation gives you grounds to go after her directly."
Damon looked at me with an expression I hadn't seen from him before.
"You sound like you've been thinking about this for a while," he said.
"I've been thinking about how to protect Eli for four years," I said.
"This is the same problem.
It's just louder now."
He nodded slowly.
Then: "Carter identified the leak this morning.
It was his assistant.
She's been terminated and we're pursuing legal action."
"And Diane?"
"Carter is pulling phone records.
If she called the journalist, we'll have it by end of day."
I stood up again.
"Good."
Eli appeared in the doorway in his pajamas, hair flattened on one side, stone in hand.
"I woke up and I could see the whole city," he announced.
"It was still dark but there were lights everywhere."
"Did you like it?" I asked.
"It was like looking at stars but upside down," he said.
He looked at Damon.
"Do you see it every morning?"
"Every morning," Damon said.
Eli walked over and climbed into the chair beside him without ceremony.
"I think I would like that," he said.
"If I lived here."
Damon looked at me over Eli's head.
I looked back.
May you like
Neither of us said anything.
But the question was already in the room.
