Chapter 5 - THE ROOM ABOVE THE BAKERY
I stared at the tarnished brass safe-deposit key lying across Grace’s palm on its faded blue ribbon.
My grandfather, Arthur Vance, had been the only person in my family who truly loved Grace from the day I brought her home. Back when my mother looked down her nose at Grace because her father had been a union machinist in Joliet, my grandfather used to sit with her on the back terrace in Lake Forest for hours, talking about books and baseball and how tired he was of watching his children turn the family business into a ruthless machine.
When he died in his sleep at Rush University Hospital on September sixth, three years ago—while I was stuck in New York during a thunderstorm ground stop—my mother and Julian had told me he was admitted for routine cardiac observation after feeling dizzy at the club, and that a massive stroke had taken him before midnight.
"My grandfather was at Rush the same night you were admitted for hemorrhaging?" I whispered, my hands gripping the steering wheel so hard the leather creaked. "Why didn't anyone tell me you were in the same hospital?"
"Because I was the one who brought him into the emergency room, Ryan," Grace said quietly, glancing back to make sure Leo was still playing with his plush rabbit and the girls were still asleep before she leaned closer to me.
We were parked behind a two-story brick building on Twenty-Sixth Street in Little Village, where the smell of baking bolillo rolls and sweet cinnamon drifted down into the wet alley from the neighborhood panaderia on the first floor.
"Wait here a second," I told her, stepping out into the rain and opening the rear doors.
I lifted sleeping Clara onto my left shoulder, keeping my cashmere coat wrapped tight around her tiny frame so not a drop of rain touched her, while Grace carried sleepy Maya and held Leo’s hand up the narrow exterior wooden stairs to the second-floor apartment.
When Grace unlocked the door and switched on the lamp, my breath caught in my throat.
The apartment was barely five hundred square feet—a combined kitchen and living room with linoleum floors, a radiator clanking in the corner, and a single small bedroom where three mismatched toddler beds were lined up side by side like a row of little boats. Yet everything was spotless. On the refrigerator door, held up by plastic alphabet magnets, were dozens of bright crayon drawings of buses, sunshine, and three little stick figures holding hands with a tall mama.
And sitting on the narrow wooden mantelpiece above the radiator, inside a cheap five-dollar frame from a drugstore, was a candid photograph of me laughing on the pier at Navy Pier five years ago, wearing an old Cubs sweatshirt.
She had kept my picture on her mantel for three years.
"Why did you keep my photo up if you thought I abandoned you at the hospital?" I asked softly as I laid Clara down on the middle toddler bed and pulled a hand-knitted yellow blanket up to her chin.
Grace stood in the doorway of the tiny bedroom after tucking Maya in beside her sister. Little Leo toddled over to his own bed by the window, climbed up with his blue rabbit, and looked back at me with my own gray-blue eyes.
"Night-night, man," Leo murmured, his thumb slipping into his mouth as his eyelids drooped.
I walked over, knelt beside his mattress, and gently brushed the sandy cowlick off his forehead. My voice cracked on the words I had waited a lifetime to say without even knowing it. "Goodnight, son."
I followed Grace back into the tiny kitchen and pulled the bedroom door mostly shut. While the radiator hissed in the quiet room, she placed the brass safe-deposit key on the small Formica table between us.
"I kept your picture up because your grandfather made me swear I wouldn't let them make me hate you," Grace said, her hands wrapped around a mug of tap water. "On the afternoon of September fifth, three years ago, your grandfather drove to our brownstone in Lincoln Park to check on me because you were in New York. When he walked into the front hall, I was on the bottom step of the stairs bleeding, and your mother and Amelia were standing in the dining room with Julian."
My heart stopped. "My mother, Amelia, and Julian were in our house on September fifth?"
"They didn't know I was home upstairs," Grace said, her voice steady and low. "I had come downstairs to get a glass of water when I heard Julian telling your mother that the Canary Wharf project in London was thirty million dollars underwater because he had used the commercial escrow account to cover his private hedge fund losses with Amelia’s father."
The room seemed to tilt beneath my feet.
"Canary Wharf wasn't underwater," I said quickly. "My grandfather’s personal trust guaranteed the thirty-million-dollar bridge loan the week after his funeral!"
"Because your grandfather refused to sign that guarantee while he was alive!" Grace leaned across the table, her eyes locking onto mine. "I heard your grandfather walk through the front door right behind them. He had found out that morning from the bank auditors what Julian and Mr. Brooks had done. He told Julian and your mother right there in our foyer that at nine o'clock the next morning, he was going to his lawyers to remove Julian as COO, report the escrow fraud to the SEC, and rewrite the Vance Family Voting Trust so that complete control of the company passed not to you or Julian—but to the surviving issue of our marriage upon their birth, with you and me as joint trustees."
Every lie from the last three years shattered at once.
My grandfather hadn't just wanted to protect the company; he had known about the babies.
"When I stepped out onto the stairs and gasped because the cramps hit me," Grace continued, a tear slipping down her cheek, "your grandfather saw the blood on my dress, ignored Julian’s shouting, and drove me straight to Rush Hospital himself. Once the doctors stabilized me at midnight, he walked across the skybridge to the cardiac tower because his chest was hurting from the stress. At two in the morning, he snuck back down to my room in a hospital wheelchair, pressed this brass key into my hand, and told me he had locked the signed trust codicil and the SEC audit evidence inside a private box under my maiden name at the LaSalle Street Vault. Six hours later, the nurse came in and told me he had died of cardiac arrest right after Julian and Amelia visited him at dawn."
My knees went weak, and I sank into the wooden kitchen chair across from her.
"They didn't just steal my children from me," I whispered, the horror of it turning my blood to ice. "When I went to London in October, Julian forged my signature on the thirty-million-dollar bridge guarantee using my grandfather’s old estate power of attorney—and he needed our marriage dissolved and our babies erased from the legal bloodline before they were born, because if the trust executors ever found out I had living children with you, the entire estate audit would be triggered automatically!"
Suddenly, the screen of my phone lit up on the kitchen table—not with a call from my mother, and not from Amelia.
May you like
It was a home security notification from the Nest camera at my townhouse in Lincoln Park, followed by a text message from Julian:
I see from your GPS tracker on the company SUV that you’re on 26th Street, big brother. Come downstairs inside five minutes with Grandfather’s vault key, or the immigration raid ICE is conducting on that unlicensed bakery downstairs is going to put the family who sheltered your ex-wife in federal detention tonight—and Child Protective Services is right behind me to take custody of three medically neglected preemies living over a commercial oven.
