Chapter 13 - Sloan’s Unspoken Burden
The room seemed to shrink around me until all that existed were those predatory blue eyes.
"Victoria?" I whispered, grasping the edge of the doorway.
Brenda stepped between us, her voice raised in warning.
"You disappeared before Sloan graduated high school."
"The police said you fled the country after the maritime scandal."
Victoria took a slow, calculated sip of her tea and set the porcelain cup down without a sound.
"The police say whatever the highest bidder pays them to say, Brenda," Victoria replied calmly.
"Daniel knew that better than anyone."
She motioned toward the empty chair across the table.
"Sit down, Evelyn."
"Your legs won't hold you if you hear what is in this box while standing."
I forced myself to pull out the chair and sit.
"Why did you write a letter using Daniel’s handwriting?" I demanded, my hands clutched in my lap.
"I didn't write it," Victoria replied.
"Daniel wrote seven letters before his final hospitalization."
"He entrusted them to a law firm in Zurich with strict temporal instructions."
"Each letter was released when specific conditions were met."
"Condition one was Mercer’s arrest."
"Condition two was the survival of the lemon tree."
I stared at her, utterly bewildered.
"What does a lemon tree have to do with anything?"
Victoria leaned forward, her expression hardening.
"Thirty years ago, Daniel and I didn't just build a real estate empire."
"We uncovered an industrial easement running directly under the municipal tract where your neighborhood sits."
"The city buried three thousand drums of toxic runoff under that valley back in nineteen-seventy."
"Daniel bought the land to ensure no residential developer would ever build schools or parks over it."
"He built your house directly on top of the central containment vault to guard the access point."
"Mercer wanted that land because he brokered a deal to sell it to an overseas logistics conglomerate."
"To do that, he needed the original title deeds."
"And he needed you evicted, incapacitated, or declared legally incompetent."
Tears of sudden realization burned behind my eyelids.
"Sloan..." I whispered.
"Sloan didn't just smash my cake out of petty spite."
Victoria’s eyes softened with a flicker of genuine maternal pain.
"Mercer had Sloan under surveillance for six months."
"He told my daughter that if she didn't provoke you into striking her or burning her possessions on video, he would release photographs that would ruin Harrison's engineering career."
"Harrison was drowning in debt he accrued trying to pay off Mercer’s shadow shell companies."
"Sloan staged that disaster at your sixty-fifth birthday party to save her husband's life."
"She sacrificed her reputation with you to force the police into the house before Mercer could send his hit squad."
May you like
"And by burning her designer purse, Evelyn, you destroyed the GPS transmitter Mercer had sewn into the inner lining."
***
