Chapter 6 - Unraveling Vanessa
Three days after the bail hearing, a private courier delivered a handwritten note to Miriam Crane’s office. It was addressed to me, written on cheap floral stationery:
*I need to talk to you. Alone. He lied to me about everything. Please. St. Jude’s Chapel, 3 PM. — Vanessa.*
"It's a trap," Miriam said immediately, shaking her head. "Grant’s family is desperate. They might be trying to bait you into a confrontation to invalidate the restraining order or provoke a scene."
"No," I replied, studying the frantic, slanted handwriting. "Vanessa isn't an architect; she’s an opportunist. An opportunist who just realized the ship she boarded is taking on water in the middle of the Atlantic. She’s terrified."
We compromised: I would meet her inside the quiet, stone-walled nave of St. Jude’s Chapel, but Miriam and two plainclothes security officers would be sitting three pews back.
When I entered the dim, candlelit sanctuary, Vanessa was already there. She wore no makeup, her hair pulled into an untidy bun, wrapped in an oversized trench coat that looked three sizes too large. The haughty, smirking woman who had stood in my kitchen drinking tea was gone. In her place sat a pale, frightened girl barely out of her twenties.
"You came," she breathed, looking behind me nervously.
I sat at the opposite end of the wooden pew. "You have five minutes, Vanessa. Make them count."
She burst into tears, burying her face in her hands. "He told me you agreed to the divorce. He told me you were having an affair with your personal trainer and that you didn't even want the baby! He swore on his mother’s life that the house belonged to him, that you were just staying there until the delivery because of medical complications!"
"And you believed him?" I asked, cold skepticism lacing my words. "You thought it was perfectly reasonable to show up at dawn, put on another woman's dead mother’s coat, and demand she vacate her own kitchen?"
"He said the coat was a family heirloom from his grandmother!" Vanessa sobbed, her chest heaving. "He gave it to me for my birthday last week! He said you stole it out of his family’s estate when your mother passed away! I didn't know, Elena... I swear to God, I didn't know about the money, or the violence."
I watched her cry, feeling neither pity nor satisfaction. "What do you want, Vanessa?"
She reached into her canvas tote bag and pulled out a thumb drive, setting it trembling on the polished wood between us. "His personal laptop... he left it at my apartment before he came to your house that morning. He told me if anything ever happened to him, I was supposed to throw it into the river. I didn't. I had a technician friend crack the password."
"What's on it?"
"The real bank transfers," she whispered. "And the medical records. Grant had a doctor lined up in Philadelphia—a corrupt psychiatrist who was paid sixty thousand dollars to sign an involuntary institutionalization order for you the day after you gave birth. He was going to drug you, Elena. He was going to make you look insane."
A chill raced down my spine, freezing the breath in my throat. The depravity of his plan was bottomless.
"Why give this to me?" I asked, looking into her red-rimmed eyes.
"Because yesterday, his mother called me," Vanessa said, her voice shaking violently. "Eleanor said that if I didn't sign an NDA and surrender all rights to my unborn baby to the Sterling trust, they would cut me off and ensure I was indicted as a co-conspirator in Grant's fraud charges. They're going to destroy me, Elena. Just like they were going to destroy you."
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I picked up the thumb drive, feeling its sharp edges against my fingers. "You're going to give a full, sworn deposition to Miriam Crane this afternoon. You're going to take a prenatal paternity test through my independent lab. If you tell the absolute truth, I'll ensure you have legal immunity and enough support to disappear. If you lie to me by so much as a single syllable, I will let the state attorney throw you in a cell right next to Grant."
Vanessa nodded frantically. "Whatever you want. Just don't let them take my child."
