Chapter 6: What Mercer Wanted
Leo was asleep when I reached the nursery.
Mrs.
Patton, the day nurse, had arrived during the commotion and was sitting in the rocking chair near the window with a book open in her lap, her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
She looked up when I came in.
"He went down about twenty minutes ago," she said softly.
"Poor little thing wore himself out."
"Thank you," I said.
"I'm sorry about the morning."
She looked at me over her glasses with the particular expression of a woman who has worked in other people's houses long enough to know when not to ask questions.
"I'll stay until you tell me otherwise," she said, and went back to her book.
I stood at the crib for a moment.
Leo's face in sleep was completely unguarded — his mouth slightly open, his small chest rising and falling in the slow, even rhythm that always made something loosen in my chest.
Sophie had sent me a photograph of him sleeping, taken in the hospital the day after he was born.
She had written underneath it: *He looks like he already knows everything and has decided it's fine.*
I heard Ethan's footsteps in the corridor before he appeared in the doorway.
"Come downstairs," he said quietly.
"We need to talk."
We sat in the kitchen — not the formal dining room, not his study, but the kitchen, at the long oak table where the household staff ate their meals.
Ethan poured two cups of coffee without asking and set one in front of me.
It was the first time in eleven months he had done that.
"Tell me about Mercer," he said.
I wrapped both hands around the mug.
"I worked for him for two years as his personal assistant.
He was difficult but not cruel, at first.
After the lawsuit against your company failed, he changed.
He became obsessed with finding something he could use against you — some piece of information, some leverage." I looked at the surface of the coffee.
"He found out about my friendship with Sophie.
He knew she and I had reconnected before she d*ed.
He came to me three months after her funeral and offered to cover my expenses if I could get a position in your household and report back to him."
"Report what?"
"Anything.
Financial conversations.
Business calls.
Visitors.
He thought you were hiding assets — that the settlement had been structured to protect money he was owed."
"And you agreed," Ethan said.
"I agreed to let him think I agreed," I said.
"I took the money for three months because I had nothing, Ethan.
I had lost my job when his company collapsed after the lawsuit.
I had nothing saved.
But I never sent him a single piece of information.
Not once.
I came here for Leo.
That was the only reason."
Ethan was quiet for a moment.
Outside the kitchen window, the estate's back garden was bright and still — the kind of late morning that had no idea what had happened inside the house.
"He'll say otherwise," Ethan said.
"I know."
"Victoria's attorney will use him."
"I know that too."
Ethan set his mug down.
"Do you have anything that proves your contact with Mercer was one-sided?
Messages, emails, anything that shows you never gave him information?"
"I kept everything," I said.
"Every text, every email, every voicemail.
I kept them for the same reason I kept Sophie's messages.
Because I knew this day would come eventually and I needed to be able to show someone the truth."
Ethan looked at me for a long moment.
"Why didn't you just tell me?" he said.
"When you first came here.
Why not tell me who you were and why you came?"
"Because you were engaged to Victoria," I said.
"And I didn't know yet whether you knew what she was."
He absorbed that.
"And now?" he said.
"Now I think you didn't know," I said.
"I think you were grieving and lonely and she found you at exactly the right moment.
And I think Sophie would have forgiven you for that, because she wasn't someone who held things against people." I paused.
"But I also think Sophie was right to be scared.
And I think whatever Victoria was doing in this house before Sophie d*ed needs to be looked at properly.
Not by me.
By people who know how."
Ethan's phone was on the table between us.
He looked at it, then back at me.
"My attorney is already on his way," he said.
"I want you to give him everything.
The voicemails, the Mercer correspondence, all of it."
"All right," I said.
"And Clara." He waited until I looked up.
"You're not fired.
You're not a suspect.
And you're not going anywhere until we understand what happened to Sophie."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Okay," I said.
He picked up his phone and started to dial.
I drank my coffee and listened to the garden through the window, and somewhere above us, Leo slept on, unknowing and safe, while the truth began its slow and necessary work of coming to the surface.
That afternoon, Ethan's attorney — a compact, precise man named Gerald Foss — arrived with a paralegal and two large document cases.
He set up at the dining room table and spent three hours with me going through everything I had saved.
He asked clean, specific questions and wrote the answers in a small leather notebook without reacting to any of it.
When we finished, he closed the notebook and looked at me.
"You understand," he said, "that Mercer is going to claim you were an active participant in an attempt to gather proprietary information."
"Yes," I said.
"And you're prepared for that."
"I have eleven months of nothing," I said.
"No emails sent.
No calls made.
No documents photographed or forwarded.
Whatever he claims, the record is empty."
Gerald nodded slowly.
"The voicemails from Sophie Vance are significant," he said.
"Particularly the one describing an unannounced visit to the property and the open window in the nursery."
"I know," I said.
He tapped his pen once against the notebook.
"Miss Whitfield — do you know what Sophie d*ed of?"
"Cardiac event," I said.
"That's what the death certificate said."
Gerald looked at me steadily.
"She was twenty-nine years old," he said.
"No prior cardiac history.
No family history." He paused.
"The original investigation was closed in under two weeks."
The room felt different after he said that.
"Are you telling me it should be reopened?" I said.
"I'm telling you," Gerald said carefully, "that the evidence you've provided today gives us grounds to ask that question formally." He stood and began gathering his papers.
"I'll be in touch by tomorrow morning."
He left.
The dining room was empty and very still.
I sat at the table for a long time after that, thinking about a pale blue scarf with a daisy near the hem, and a woman who had called me two days before she d*ed to say that something felt wrong.
May you like
She had been right.
She had been right about all of it.
