Chapter 22 - The Foundling Registry
The room seemed to tilt beneath me. The name written on the brittle parish card was *Hannah Miller*.
Hannah wasn't a shadowy figure hiding in some remote upstate hamlet. She was the quiet, razor-sharp junior compliance auditor Marcus had hired six months ago to oversee the internal reconciliation of Hayes Holdings' tax liabilities. She was thirty-seven years old, soft-spoken, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and carried herself with an unassuming precision that made her almost invisible among the high-powered lawyers.
She had spent forty hours a week auditing the very accounts that were rightfully hers by birthright—and she had no idea.
"Are you certain of this?" I asked, my fingers shaking as I touched the aged card. "There’s no chance of an error in the ledger?"
Father Gregory shook his head slowly. "The baptismal record matches the hospital voucher Charles Hayes personally paid in October 1986. The girl’s mother was a concert pianist named Evelyn Cross. She died of complications during childbirth. Charles had loved her in secret for years, long before Eleanor’s family forced their political alliance upon him. He knew Eleanor would destroy the child if she ever found out, so he entrusted Evelyn’s baby to our society. The Miller family took her in with full sealed papers."
I sat in the dim light of the church parlor, the gravity of the revelation pressing down on my chest like lead.
Hannah Miller was Charles Hayes’s only living biological child. She was the rightful owner of sixty percent of one of the largest real estate and venture conglomerates on the Eastern Seaboard. And she was currently sitting in Marcus’s downtown office, categorizing Daniel’s fraudulent expense receipts from his weekend in Cabo.
"Does anyone else know?" I asked, leaning forward.
"Nobody living," Father Gregory said softly. "Except now you. And perhaps whoever ordered the lockbox moved from the bank vault last week."
My stomach plummeted. "What did you say?"
"A courier came to our parish last Thursday," Father Gregory recalled, frowning with deep concern. "He carried a notarized request from Vance Capital Management, asking for historical baptismal transcripts from the fall of 1986. I refused him, of course, because the records are sealed by court decree. But they were looking, Katherine. Someone inside the Vance circle already knew."
Eleanor.
Eleanor hadn't just stashed the codicil in her safe to forget about it; she had been trying to hunt down Charles’s daughter before the forensic audit stripped her bare. If Eleanor found Hannah first, she wouldn't offer her an inheritance. She would offer her an ND-agreement wrapped in a buyout, or worse, maneuver her into signing away her rights before Hannah ever realized the magnitude of what she held.
I thanked Father Gregory, hurried out to my car, and dialed Marcus immediately.
"Marcus," I said, gunning the engine as I pulled onto the empty avenue. "Where is Hannah Miller right now?"
"Hannah? She’s at the office. She insisted on pulling an all-nighter to finish cross-referencing Daniel’s offshore accounts before tomorrow's filing. Why?"
"Lock the doors of the firm," I ordered, my voice trembling with adrenaline. "Do not let anyone in, and do not let Hannah leave until I get there. She isn't just our auditor, Marcus. She is Charles Hayes’s daughter."
A stunned silence hung on the line for four full seconds. "Katherine... that’s impossible. Hannah’s background check—"
"Was clean because she was legally adopted as an infant," I interrupted. "Her birth mother was Evelyn Cross. The codicil names her. And Eleanor’s people were already sniffing around the parish records last week. We have to speak with her before Eleanor realizes we have the safe’s contents."
"Get here now," Marcus said, his tone instantly shifting into battle readiness. "I’ll make sure she stays in Conference Room B."
I hung up and sped down FDR Drive, the city lights reflecting off the dark surface of the East River like shattered glass. My mind raced through the implications. If I told Hannah the truth, I was handing over the entire empire. The control I had secured to protect Noah from Daniel’s reckless debts would belong to a woman I barely knew.
Could I trust her? If she inherited sixty percent of the shares, what would stop her from siding with Daniel or selling the company off to liquidators, leaving Noah with nothing?
Yet the alternative was far darker: letting Eleanor’s shadow reign continue, perpetuating a monstrous lie that would eventually collapse under the weight of an inevitable paternity subpoena.
Ten minutes later, I swept through the glass doors of Marcus’s 32nd-floor office. The reception area was dark, but a single fluorescent light spilled out from the end of the corridor.
I pushed open the door to Conference Room B.
Hannah was sitting at the massive glass table, surrounded by stacks of bank printouts and a half-empty mug of coffee. When she looked up, her tired hazel eyes behind her glasses bore an uncanny, chilling resemblance to the oil portrait of Charles Hayes that hung in the corporate lobby.
"Katherine?" she asked, surprised. "Mr. Vance said you needed to review the offshore reconciliation urgently. Did something happen with Daniel's team?"
I closed the door behind me, looked at Marcus standing quietly in the corner, and pulled the yellowed index card and the scanned codicil from my purse.
"Hannah," I said gently, pulling out the chair directly across from her. "What did your parents tell you about where you were born?"
Hannah’s expression instantly froze. Her pen remained suspended over the financial ledger, and the color slowly drained from her cheeks.
"Why are you asking me about my adoption?" she whispered, her voice tightening with immediate defensiveness. "What does my personal life have to do with Daniel Hayes's audit?"
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"Because," I said, sliding Charles Hayes's handwritten testament across the glass table toward her, "you aren't auditing another family's fortune, Hannah. You've been auditing your own."
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