Chapter 13 - The Ghost in the Clinic
The rain beat a relentless tattoo against the glass roof of the abandoned Greenfield Botanical Gardens.
It was midnight, and the fog hung thick around the rusted iron gates on the outskirts of town.
I refused to let James go alone, leaving Liam’s godfather, Marcus, to guard Hope’s hospital room with armed private security.
James gripped a heavy iron tire iron in his coat pocket as we pushed through the rotting wooden doors of the greenhouse.
The scent of damp moss, decaying leaves, and bitter damp earth filled my nose.
A single battery-operated lantern sat on a cracked stone fountain in the center of the overgrown room.
Sitting on the stone bench beside the light was a woman wrapped in a woolen shawl, her face obscured by shadow.
She did not look up when our boots crunched across the shattered glass littering the flagstones.
"You shouldn't have brought your wife, James," a quiet, raspy voice drifted through the darkness.
James froze in his tracks, his entire body shuddering as if struck by lightning.
"Evelyn?" James whispered, his voice trembling with an emotion I could not decipher.
The woman lifted her head, letting the shawl fall back from her silver-streaked dark hair.
She possessed the same piercing, jade-green eyes that I had stared into every time I looked at Hope’s face.
The breath vanished from my lungs as my knees went entirely weak.
"Who is this, James?" I asked, my voice rising in panic as I grabbed his sleeve.
"Evelyn Cross," the woman answered for him, standing up with painful, deliberate slowness.
"Twelve years ago, I was Sarah’s private palliative care nurse."
"And I was also Sarah’s half-sister, born to the woman Eleanor Vance’s husband loved before he abandoned us."
"Eleanor never knew my father had another daughter until Sarah introduced us on her deathbed."
"Sarah didn't want Eleanor to ever have power over another living soul," Evelyn said, tears shimmering in her green eyes.
"Sarah begged me to replace her damaged ovarian tissue with my own at the cryo-bank."
"She wanted James to have a child free of the Vance family’s generational rot."
"So Hope isn't Sarah's biological child?" I gasped, the world spinning in nauseating circles around me.
"Hope is my daughter and James’s daughter," Evelyn stated, meeting my gaze without a single trace of shame.
"And Eleanor discovered the swap two weeks before Sarah died."
"Eleanor didn't destroy the embryos, Claire."
"She kept them in a private facility to harvest them when the time was right."
"And there wasn't just one embryo thawed six months ago."
Evelyn stepped closer to the lantern, her hands trembling as she pulled an ultrasound image from her coat.
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"Hope has a twin brother, James."
"And Eleanor has had him locked in her estate since the day they were born."
