Chapter 2 - The Widow Who Wasn’t
I did not move.
“You were what?”
Delia looked exhausted.
“His wife.”
“Ewan wasn’t married.”
“He was.”
“To you?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Eleven months.”
I stood so fast the chair scraped backward.
“My brother told me everything.”
“No,” she said quietly. “Apparently he didn’t.”
I wanted to be angry at her.
Instead, I was angry at a dead man.
Or a man I had believed was dead.
“Start talking.”
She looked toward the hospital door.
I closed it.
Delia took a slow breath.
She had met Ewan seven years earlier in a neighborhood clinic where she worked nights.
He had shown up with a split lip and refused to give his real name.
She stitched him up.
He came back three days later with coffee.
Then again the next week.
“He hated your world,” she said.
“He benefited from it.”
“He hated that too.”
That sounded like Ewan.
My brother had enjoyed our money and despised the hands that earned it.
Delia continued.
They married at a courthouse in Wisconsin.
No family.
No announcement.
Two witnesses.
“Why hide it?”
“Because he was scared.”
“Of me?”
“No.”
She paused.
“Of your father.”
My father had been dead three years.
Even in memory, Malcolm Vale had a way of making a room feel smaller.
“What did my father have to do with Pier 44?”
“I don’t know everything.”
“Tell me what you do know.”
Delia’s good hand tightened around the blanket.
“Three weeks before the fire, Ewan found records inside an old shipping company your father controlled.”
“What records?”
“Payments. Judges. Inspectors. City officials. Men at the docks.”
“That wasn’t exactly a family secret.”
“It wasn’t your family making the payments.”
I stopped.
Delia said, “It was the Vandermarks.”
The name settled between us.
Celeste’s family had been part of Chicago money longer than skyscrapers had shadows.
Real estate.
Ports.
Construction.
Hospitals.
Politics.
Clean money on television.
Dirty money everywhere else.
Delia continued.
“Ewan said your father had made some kind of agreement with August Vandermark years earlier.”
August.
Celeste’s father.
“What agreement?”
“He never told me.”
“Convenient.”
“He was trying to protect me.”
“That’s what liars always call it.”
Her eyes hardened.
“You don’t get to judge him for hiding things while you’re engaged to the woman who tried to drag me into a cellar.”
That shut me up.
Delia looked away.
“On the night of the fire, Ewan called me at 11:48.”
My hands went cold.
The fire started shortly after midnight.
“What did he say?”
“That he’d been wrong.”
“About what?”
“He thought someone wanted the records.”
Delia’s voice dropped.
“They wanted him.”
She told me Ewan had gotten out through a broken loading tunnel that emptied under the river access road.
His back was burned.
His left arm was cut open.
He came to her apartment at three in the morning.
Alive.
Bleeding.
Terrified.
“You saw him?”
“I treated him.”
“Then where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
Delia’s eyes filled, but her voice remained steady.
“He stayed twelve hours.”
Then Ewan disappeared.
All he left behind was his wedding ring and a note.
Delia remembered every word.
IF I STAY, THEY WILL USE YOU TO FIND ME.
TELL NO ONE.
NOT EVEN DAMIAN.
I stared at her.
“Why me?”
“He didn’t say.”
For years I had believed my brother died calling my name inside a burning warehouse.
Now I learned he had lived long enough to tell his wife not to trust me.
It hurt more than I expected.
“Then why did you come into my house?”
Delia glanced toward me.
“Four years ago, your mother collapsed.”
“I know.”
The doctors had called it a devastating neurological event.
She survived.
Her body remained mostly functional.
But language disappeared.
Speech.
Writing.
Nearly every reliable form of communication.
Delia said, “Three days after she was discharged, I found a package outside my apartment.”
“What package?”
“Ewan’s ring.”
My skin prickled.
“There was a note with it.”
“What did it say?”
Delia hesitated.
“Keep her alive. She knows where I am.”
I stared at her.
“Ewan sent that?”
“I believed he did.”
“Believed?”
“The handwriting looked right.”
She swallowed.
“But there was one more line.”
“What?”
Delia looked directly at me.
“Don’t let Celeste Ward near her.”
I frowned.
“Celeste Ward?”
Delia’s face changed.
“Damian…”
“What?”
“That was the name Ewan knew her by.”
The door opened behind me.
Marcus Keane, my oldest friend and head of security, stepped inside.
His face had lost its color.
“Damian.”
I stood.
“What?”
He glanced at Delia.
Then back at me.
“Celeste is gone.”
I felt something hard settle inside my chest.
May you like
Marcus continued.
“And she took every medical file your mother had.”
