Chapter 4 - THE WATCH ON THE OTHER WRIST
The rain drummed a steady, deafening rhythm against the roof of my parked SUV beside Douglas Park, while in the backseat, my three-year-old son hummed softly to himself and my two daughters slept under my cashmere coat.
I stared at the laminated Cook County Hospital visitor badge from three years ago.
VANCE / RYAN MR. — Oct 14, 9:14 AM.
"A man walked into your delivery room wearing my watch and carrying my driver’s license?" I repeated, my voice dropping to a hoarse scrape so I wouldn't startle Leo in the back. "Grace, I was at the Savoy Hotel in London on October fourteenth! I had a nine o'clock breakfast meeting with the Barclays syndicate!"
Grace didn't look at me. She stared out the passenger window at the wet iron fence of the park, her fingers twisting the thin silver charm bracelet on her wrist around and around.
"I know you were in London," she said quietly. "Wait—no, I didn't know that then. Three days before my water broke, I went to your office at Vance Development to tell you I was twenty-nine weeks pregnant with triplets. Your doctors had put me on strict bed rest a month earlier because my blood pressure was spiking, and every time I called your cell phone while you were traveling, it went straight to voicemail."
"I never got a single voicemail from you that month!" I said, gripping the leather steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. "My assistant told me you had changed your number and moved in with your sister in Milwaukee! When I came home between trips in September, your closet was empty and your keys were on the kitchen island!"
Grace turned her head slowly toward me, her dark eyes blazing with a mixture of old agony and sudden confusion. "I don't have a sister in Milwaukee, Ryan! My only cousin lives in Ohio! And I didn't empty my closet—I was admitted to the high-risk antepartum ward at Rush University Hospital on September fifth because I was hemorrhaging! When I begged Amelia to call you at your hotel in New York, she came to my hospital room the next day with a suitcase of my clothes from our house and told me you had moved your things into the club downtown because you couldn't handle a high-risk pregnancy during the merger!"
The air in the car turned to ice.
Amelia.
September fifth, three years ago. I remembered coming home from New York on September seventh to an empty brownstone. My mother and Amelia had been waiting for me in the kitchen with a casserole and grim, sympathetic faces. My mother had handed me a letter typed on Grace’s stationery—saying she couldn't bear the coldness of my family anymore and was leaving Chicago—and told me she had helped Grace pack so there wouldn't be an ugly scene when I got back.
I had believed every word of it. Worse than that—my pride had been so bruised that when my family’s attorney brought me the final uncontested divorce decree in London five weeks later, I signed it without ever picking up the phone to hear her voice myself.
"Why were you at Cook County Hospital on October fourteenth if you were admitted to Rush in September?" I asked, my voice trembling.
"Because the morning after Amelia brought my suitcase to Rush, hospital billing told me you had removed me from the Vance corporate health insurance policy," Grace whispered, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. "Rush transferred me to the public charity ward at Cook County when my preeclampsia turned severe at twenty-nine weeks. And at six in the morning on October fourteenth, when my placenta started detaching and the doctors prepped me for an emergency C-section, I was terrified I was going to die on the table without anyone knowing where the babies were. So I called the emergency contact number on your corporate directory."
"Who came to the hospital, Grace?"
"Amelia drove there first," Grace said, her voice steady and cold now. "She stood outside the hallway curtains while a man in a dark coat came inside with a notary public. I was on magnesium sulfate to stop me from having a seizure, Ryan. My vision was blurred, and the alarm on the fetal monitor was screaming because Clara’s heart rate was dropping below sixty. The man held your driver’s license up to the nurse to get past security, leaned over my bed so I could see your grandfather’s gold watch on his left wrist, and slid the divorce and custody waiver under my hand."
My left hand went instinctively to my wrist—to the vintage gold Patek Philippe my grandfather had left me.
Wait.
Three years ago, in August—right before Grace went into the hospital—that watch hadn't been on my wrist. The leather strap had snapped during our annual family golf tournament in Lake Geneva, and I had given it to my younger brother, Julian, our company’s Chief Operating Officer, to drop off at the jeweler on Michigan Avenue while I flew to New York.
And in my desk drawer at Vance Development, I always kept my expired renewal driver’s license alongside my passport photocopy for corporate property filings.
Julian had the watch. Julian had access to my desk. And Julian had the exact same six-foot-one frame and dark hair as me under a hospital surgical mask.
"It was Julian," I breathed, the realization hitting me like a physical blow to the sternum.
Before Grace could answer, my phone rang through the SUV’s Bluetooth speaker on the dashboard, flashing my mother’s name across the screen in bright white letters.
I didn't press ignore. I pressed answer—and hit mute on my microphone so she couldn't hear us inside the car.
"Ryan, if you are listening to this voicemail," my mother’s clipped, urgent voice filled the cabin over the sound of the rain, "you need to come to The Drake immediately. Julian just called me from the office. The bank examiners auditing the Canary Wharf refinancing just flagged a four-thousand-eight-hundred-dollar charge on your corporate card at St. Jude’s Pediatric Pavilion. Ryan, listen to me very carefully—do not speak to Grace until Julian and Amelia explain the trust structure to you! If the board finds out those children exist before midnight tonight, your grandfather’s entire estate forfeits to her!"
The line clicked dead.
In the quiet car, I turned slowly in my seat and looked at Grace.
"My grandfather’s estate?" I asked softly. "Grace... what did my grandfather put in his will before he died?"
May you like
Grace reached into her damp canvas bag and pulled out not a legal document, but a small, tarnished brass safe-deposit key on a faded blue ribbon.
"Your grandfather didn't die of a stroke while you were in New York that September, Ryan," Grace whispered. "He came to see me at Rush Hospital the night before they transferred me to County—and he gave me this right before Julian walked into his room."
