I blinked. “Who?”
“The donor requested anonymity, but the man who authorized it… he’s been here every night. A Mr. Adrien Cole.”
The name didn’t register. I didn’t know an Adrien Cole. I worked in operations; I knew the names of our investors, but this name felt like it was written in a language I hadn’t learned yet.
“He left this for you,” Marilyn added, placing a book on my bedside table.
It was an old, leather-bound copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I opened the cover with trembling fingers. On the flyleaf, in a precise, elegant hand, were the words: To my daughter. I hope one day you’ll understand why I stayed away. — A.C.
My heart didn’t just skip; it felt like it was trying to claw its way out of my chest. Daughter?
I looked up at the glass door. The man was there. He wasn’t standing this time; he was sitting in the hallway chair, his head in his hands. He looked up, and for the first time, our eyes met through the glass.
They were blue. The exact, startling, electric blue that looked so “wrong” on me.
Cliffhanger: I reached for my phone, my hands shaking so violently I nearly dropped it, and searched for the name Adrien Cole. The first result was a Forbes profile: CEO of Cole Capital, Net Worth $2.4 Billion. But it was the second result that broke me: a news clipping from 1992 about a young engineer who had been legally barred from contacting his infant child after a bitter dispute with a woman named Eleanor Pierce.
Chapter 4: The Bahamas Return
Seven days after I collapsed, the doors to the ICU swung open with a flourish.
My mother, Eleanor, walked in looking radiant. Her skin was tanned a deep bronze, and she was carrying a duty-free bag from the Nassau airport. My sister, Vanessa, followed behind, complaining about the humidity in the hospital.
“Jalissa! You’re awake!” My mother chirped, walking to my bedside as if she had just come back from a weekend at the grocery store. “We were so worried. The Bahamas was lovely, but we were thinking of you the whole time.”
I looked at her. I didn’t see my mother. I saw a stranger who had stolen thirty-two years of my life.
“The bill, Mom,” I said, my voice cold and flat.
“Oh, don’t worry about that now, sweetheart,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “The receptionist said it was settled. I assume your insurance at the firm is better than we thought. Anyway, we need to talk about the wedding fund. Since you saved so much on the hospital bill, Vanessa was thinking we could upgrade the floral package…”
“It wasn’t insurance,” I interrupted.
My mother froze. “What?”
“The bill was paid by a man named Adrien Cole.”
The transformation was instantaneous. The tan seemed to drain from my mother’s face, leaving her a sickly, ashen gray. She dropped the duty-free bag. A bottle of expensive rum shattered inside it, the smell of sugar and alcohol filling the room.
“How… how do you know that name?” she hissed.
“He’s been here every night, Mom. While you were sipping cocktails in Nassau, he was standing outside that glass door. He paid for the surgery that saved my life. He paid for my MBA. He’s the one who invested two million dollars in my company just to make sure I had a job.”
I leaned forward, the pain in my chest flare-up, but I didn’t care. “He’s my father, isn’t he?”
“Daniel is your father!” she screamed, her voice cracking. “He raised you! He gave you his name!”
“And you gave him a lie!” I shouted back, the monitors beeping frantically as my heart rate spiked. “You told him I was his. You told Adrien to stay away. You threatened him with the police. You turned me into a secret you could use to bleed Daniel dry and then me!”
“I did it for you!” she wailed, the classic defense of the narcissist. “I chose security! Adrien was a nobody then! He was just a boy with big dreams and no money!”
