Chapter 3 - Z
Clara agreed to meet me at a quiet diner three towns over, away from the prying eyes of our local community. The diner was a greasy, vinyl-boothed dive off Interstate 80, smelling of burnt oil and stale tobacco. Clara sat in the corner booth, wrapped in an oversized knit sweater, nervously stirring a mug of black coffee that had long since gone cold.
When I sat across from her, she couldn't look me in the eye.
"You heard about Nate and Emily," I said softly.
Clara nodded slowly, her fingers tracing the rim of her coffee cup. "The whole county is talking, Martha. Rumors spread fast in small towns. People are saying Nate found out the baby isn't his."
"It's not just a rumor, Clara. It's the truth. Luke is Adrian's son."
Clara closed her eyes tightly, taking a shuddering breath. "God... I was hoping I was wrong. I was praying that I was just being paranoid."
My heart stopped. "What do you mean, paranoid? Clara, what did you know?"
She reached into her purse and pulled out a small, worn leather journal. The edges of the pages were frayed, signed with scribbled dates from a year ago.
"Before Adrian died," Clara began, her voice trembling, "he changed. He became distant, obsessed with his phone, leaving the house at odd hours. I thought he was having an affair, so one night when he was in the shower, I checked his messages. I didn't find texts to a woman. I found texts to a private investigator."
I stared at her, stunned. "A private investigator? Why?"
"Adrian wasn't just sleeping with Emily while Nate was in Denver," Clara revealed, her eyes glossy with unshed tears. "He was convinced that Emily was playing both of them. He told me... well, he didn't tell me everything, but I read his notes. Adrian suspected Emily was having an affair with someone else entirely before she slept with him."
"That doesn't make sense," I stammered, my mind racing. "Emily was devoted to Nate. Or... at least we thought she was."
"Martha, look at the timeline," Clara urged, sliding the journal across the table toward me. "Look at the dates. Adrian slept with Emily in October. But in September—four weeks before Nate went to Denver—Emily spent five days at a medical conference in Chicago. Adrian found out she never attended the conference. She checked into a hotel downtown with a man named Julian Vance."
The name hit me like a physical blow. Julian Vance was Nate's boss—the senior partner at the engineering firm where Nate had worked for the past seven years. Julian was the man who had assigned Nate to the Denver project in the first place.
"No," I whispered, shaking my head in disbelief. "No, this is absurd. Emily slept with Adrian. The DNA test proved Adrian is the father!"
"Did it?" Clara asked pointedly. "Did you see the legal DNA report, Martha? Or did Emily just hand Nate a printed sheet of paper?"
A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck. I remembered that night in my kitchen. Emily had confessed to sleeping with Adrian. She had said she ran a DNA test after Luke was born. But Nate had never seen the certified lab results—he had only seen a printout Emily had brought home from her counselor's office, and in his grief and rage, he had ordered his own commercial DNA test using a cheek swab kit he bought online.
"Nate did a test," I argued, my voice shaking. "He sent it to a lab!"
"Commercial mail-in kits compare specific markers, Martha, but if the putative fathers are related or if the sample was tampered with... look, I don't know the scientific details," Clara admitted, her voice falling into a desperate whisper. "All I know is what Adrian wrote in his diary three days before he died. He wrote: 'Emily is using me to cover for Julian. If Nate finds out it's Julian's, it destroys his career and his marriage. If he thinks it's mine, it only destroys me.'"
I sat frozen, the noise of the diner fading into a dull, white roar.
"Adrian was going to tell Nate," Clara continued. "He was driving to Nate's house the night he died. He called me from his car, screaming that he had the real records from the clinic in Chicago. He said he was going to fix everything. And twenty minutes later, his car went off the embankment on Highway 9."
"The police said he was speeding in the rain," I choked out, tears finally spilling over my eyelashes. "They said it was an accident."
"Was it?" Clara asked softly, staring directly into my eyes. "Or did someone know what was in his glove compartment?"
I reached out and grabbed Clara's hands. They were ice cold. The world I thought I understood—the tragic, simple story of a wife's betrayal and a brother's sin—was collapsing into a dark, terrifying abyss.
"Where is the glove compartment contents?" I demanded. "The police impounded the car!"
"The car was crushed six months ago, Martha," Clara said. "Everything inside it was released to Emily as his next-of-kin, because Adrian hadn't updated his will after his parents passed."
Emily had Adrian's belongings. She had been holding them for nearly a year.
I stood up from the booth so fast my knees slammed into the table, rattling the silverware. "I have to go home," I said, my voice thick with sudden panic. "Nate is alone with her right now."
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"What?" Clara gasped.
"Emily called before I left," I said, terror seizing my chest. "She said she wanted to drop off Luke's favorite blanket and talk to Nate without the lawyers. Nate agreed."
