Instead, I pulled out my phone, turned on airplane Wi-Fi, and dialed my cousin Patricia.
She answered on the third ring. “Caroline? It’s three a.m. here. Are you okay?”
“No,” I said honestly. “But I’m alive. I’m on a plane.”
“What? Where?”
“Paris.”
There was a beat of silence. Then, more awake, “Start from the beginning.”
I told her everything. The baby shower. The silver rattle.
The divorce papers. The check. Eleanor’s words replayed with painful clarity.
“You’re telling me,” Patty said slowly when I finished, “that Eleanor Mitchell arranged a baby shower for your husband’s mistress, called those twins true heirs, handed you divorce papers and a check for seven hundred thousand dollars, and told you to disappear?”
“That about covers it.”
“And you took the money.”
“I did.” I swallowed. “And I signed the papers.”
On the line, I could hear her breathing, pacing. “Okay. But seven hundred thousand is a lot just to make someone disappear.”
“You’ve been married six years. You don’t have kids. If they really wanted to do this by the book, they could have offered far less.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what bothers me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why now?” I asked. “They could have waited. Finalized the divorce quietly.”
“Announced the twins after. Eleanor went out of her way to humiliate me publicly.”
“She wanted a clean narrative,” Patty said. “Loyal matriarch, long-suffering son, tragic wife, glowing young mother.”
“It plays better in the press if you’re neatly removed before the babies arrive.”
“It felt orchestrated,” I said. “Like this has been in the works for a while.”
“It probably has,” she agreed. “But paying you off to vanish, pushing the divorce that fast—it’s messy.”
“And rich people usually hate messy. They had a reason to rush.”
“I think so too.”
There was a pause. “What do you want me to do, Carrie?”
“I want the truth,” I said. “All of it.”
“And then I want to make sure Eleanor regrets underestimating me for the rest of her life.”
Building My Case
“Okay,” Patty said, and just like that, I felt a weight shift. “Here’s our first move.”
“When you land, I’ll file to request Derek’s DNA as part of the divorce proceedings. I’ll argue it’s relevant because of the timing with the pregnancy.”
“Spousal rights, potential children, asset division. We get Derek’s DNA, and then we keep it.”
“Secure, documented. In case we need it later.”
“In case those babies aren’t his,” I finished.
“Exactly.”
I exhaled slowly. “Do you really think that’s possible?”
She hesitated. “I think whenever something feels this off, it usually is.”
“At the very least, having his DNA gives us options.”
Options. I clung to the word like a life raft.
By the time the plane touched down at Charles de Gaulle, my grief had hardened into something sharper.
I wasn’t disappearing. I was repositioning.
Paris smelled different from Texas. Houston smelled like hot asphalt and humid air.
Paris smelled like coffee and bread and cigarette smoke. Like wet stone and old books and possibility.
The taxi dropped me in front of a narrow building in the Marais district. I’d booked the tiny one-bedroom apartment online in a sleep-deprived daze.
Creaky wooden floors and a sliver of a balcony overlooking a cobblestone alley.
When I stepped inside, it felt like the first thing in months that belonged only to me.
I dropped my suitcase in the middle of the living room. I stood there, listening to unfamiliar city sounds.
A scooter buzzing past. A dog barking. Someone laughing in rapid French.
I pressed my palm to my belly, fingers splayed over the flat plane.
“Hey,” I whispered. “It’s just you and me now, kid.”
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