Chapter 3 - The Hidden VaultI didn't go back to the country club. I didn't answer Tessa’s six missed calls or her frantic text messages asking where I had disappeared to.
Instead, I drove straight to our former lakefront mansion—the sprawling estate I had awarded myself in the divorce settlement, a place that now felt less like a home and more like a mausoleum built on lies.
The estate manager let me in with a respectful nod, assuming I was checking on property maintenance before the wedding. I locked myself in my private study on the third floor—the room where Maren used to sit by the window reading architecture journals while the evening sun dipped below the horizon.
I sat at my mahogany desk, opened the final document Marcus had given me, and turned on the reading lamp.
It was a certified copy of a birth certificate.
Child’s Name: Bellamy, Leo Rowan & Bellamy, Lily Grace (Twins).
Date of Birth: October 14.
Mother: Maren Bellamy.
Father: Rowan Bellamy.
I stared at the names until the ink blurred. Twins. A boy and a girl. Born six months after our divorce was finalized, in the dead of winter, while Maren was living out of a converted garage on the industrial outskirts of Nashville.
She hadn't just been surviving out there on Route 96 with two infants strapped to her chest. She had been raising my children. Children I had legally signed away my rights to because I had believed a stack of fabricated lies bought and paid for by the woman currently picking out crystal for our wedding reception.
My hands shook as I turned the page to read the accompanying medical report from a Nashville public clinic.
And then I saw it.
Tucked inside the medical file was a handwritten addendum—a private investigator’s field note dated eight months prior, marked with Tessa’s personal initials in the margin.
I read the words once.
Then I read them again.
My blood ran so cold my veins felt like solid ice.
“If Rowan ever learns the truth about the divorce, make sure he never finds out what happened to the third baby.”
The third baby.
The room tilted violently. I grabbed the edge of the desk to keep from falling out of my chair. Maren hadn't just had twins. There had been a third child—a third infant born during that harrowing winter, a child whose name did not appear on the birth certificate of the twins currently sleeping against her chest on that dusty Tennessee road.
Where was the third baby?
Why was there no record of it in the hospital registry?
Before my mind could process the terrifying implications, my phone buzzed violently against the wood.
It wasn't Tessa.
It was an unknown, restricted number originating from a secure satellite relay.
I swiped to answer, bringing the phone slowly to my ear.
"Rowan," a voice whispered through the static—a voice I hadn't heard in a year, a voice that sounded weathered by endless sorrow, yet sharper and more resolute than any corporate warlord I had ever faced.
"Maren," I choked out, my voice breaking on her name for the first time in twelve months. "Maren, where are you? I know about the framing. I know about Tessa. I saw the records—"
"I know what you saw, Rowan," she interrupted, her tone eerily calm, cutting through my panic like a scalpel. "And you're looking at the wrong files."
"What are you talking about?" I demanded, standing up so fast my chair crashed backward onto the Persian rug. "Maren, where is the third baby?"
A heavy, agonizing sigh echoed over the line, followed by the sound of wind whistling through open car windows.
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"Tessa didn't just steal my husband and my home, Rowan," Maren said, her voice dropping into a register that made my soul freeze. "She stole my daughter. And if you want to ever see her alive again, you need to stop looking at divorce papers... and start looking at who is funding Tessa’s family trust."
The line went dead with a sharp click.
