Chapter 2 - THE STORY HE HAD TOLD SOMEONE ELSE
Airport security arrived because Jack had reported the assault.
That part was unavoidable.
Nobody was arrested in the parking garage.
There was no dramatic handcuffing beside the terminal.
Instead, Emily gave a statement.
Jack gave one.
Daniel refused to discuss anything beyond saying he wanted an attorney.
The three men waited at a distance.
Nathan Cole identified himself as a licensed private investigator from Wisconsin.
The second man was an attorney.
The third was Michael Grant.
Emily learned his name only because Daniel reacted when Nathan introduced him.
Michael was forty-one, pale, exhausted, and visibly trying not to look at Emily’s stomach.
That frightened her in a different way.
Jack stayed near Emily until her sister arrived.
Daniel’s flight left without him.
In the airport office, Emily finally turned to Nathan.
“What does he mean about my baby?”
Nathan looked toward the attorney before answering.
“Mrs. Mercer, I think you should hear this with your own lawyer.”
“Is somebody claiming my daughter?”
“No.”
That answer came immediately.
Emily breathed again.
“Then what?”
Nathan hesitated.
Michael spoke.
“My wife and I were told you wanted to place your baby for adoption.”
Emily stared at him.
Nobody moved.
Finally she said, “I never said that.”
Michael closed his eyes.
Nathan continued gently.
“They believed they were communicating with you.”
“No.”
“They received photographs.”
Emily’s skin went cold.
“What photographs?”
“Pregnancy pictures. Ultrasound images.”
Emily remembered Daniel taking photographs after appointments.
For family, he said.
His mother.
His sister.
The baby book.
Michael looked sick.
“We were told your name was Emma.”
Emily’s legal first name was Emily.
Daniel called her Em.
Michael continued.
“We were told you were twenty-nine, separated from the baby’s father, and struggling financially.”
Emily turned toward Daniel across the room.
He was speaking quietly with security staff.
She suddenly remembered every complaint he had made about money during the pregnancy.
The nursery furniture they supposedly could not afford.
The prenatal yoga class he called ridiculous.
His insistence that they cancel the planned baby shower because finances were “too embarrassing.”
Michael’s voice broke through her thoughts.
“We paid pregnancy expenses.”
Emily looked back.
“How much?”
His attorney answered.
“Approximately fifty-six thousand dollars.”
Emily almost laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because the number made no sense.
“We haven’t received fifty-six thousand dollars.”
Michael looked at Nathan.
Nathan said, “That’s one of the reasons I was hired.”
Emily’s hand moved instinctively over her abdomen.
“When were you told she died?”
Michael swallowed.
“April eighteenth.”
Emily remembered April eighteenth.
She had been twenty-two weeks pregnant.
A routine ultrasound had found cervical shortening.
Her obstetrician sent her to the hospital for monitoring.
For six hours, Emily believed she might lose her daughter.
But the baby was fine.
Emily went home the next morning on modified activity.
Daniel cried beside her bed.
Or she thought he had cried for the same reason she did.
Michael spoke quietly.
“Daniel told us the baby didn’t survive the hospitalization.”
Emily stared across the room at her husband.
Daniel looked up.
Their eyes met.
Emily suddenly understood why he had become obsessed with keeping photographs of her pregnancy off social media after that hospital visit.
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He said he wanted privacy.
Now she wondered who exactly he had been hiding her from.
