Clara stared at him, her mind scrambling to bridge the impossible gap between a suspected affair and her estranged family. “Vanessa? Why on earth would you be hiding her from me?” “Because of your mother’s estate,” Tom explained softly, leaning forward and placing his hands open on his knees.
“Last winter, while you were completely consumed by grief and that paralyzing depression, your uncle took advantage of the situation. He quietly used fraudulent probate documents to alter your mother’s will, seizing the ancestral coastal home and the property layout so he could sell it off to commercial developers.” Tom reached into his briefcase and placed a folder on the table. “I knew that if you lost that home—the only real piece of your childhood you had left—it would completely break you.
But I couldn’t fight his corporate lawyers alone. Vanessa possessed the original, unaltered family trust records from her divorce that could prove his fraud. But she was terrified of your uncle’s retaliation. She made a non-negotiable demand: absolute, total secrecy. She wouldn’t even risk letting you know for her own safety. If your uncle caught wind of what we were doing before the case was ready, she was going to destroy the files and disappear.”