Chapter 17 - The Ledger's Final Page
Brandon stepped closer, shining his phone light over the documents inside the open briefcase. "What was in the storage locker that Scott didn't want us to find, Elena? We thought it was just the servers and the clothes."
"The clothes were a distraction," Elena said, her eyes fixed on mine. "Scott left my old wardrobe there on purpose so that if anyone ever opened the locker, they would assume it was just an abandoned personal unit. But behind the false wall in the back—behind the electrical panel Lauren found—there wasn't just a hard drive."
I looked up sharply. "The physical ledger. We found it."
"You found the domestic accounts," Elena corrected. "You didn't find the medical ledger."
A chill ran down my spine that had nothing to do with the freezing wind. "What medical ledger?"
Elena took a slow breath, glancing toward the distant runway lights before looking back at me.
"When I was living with Scott three years ago, before we were supposed to get married, I got pregnant," Elena whispered. "It was early. Six weeks. I was overjoyed. Scott told me he wanted a family more than anything in the world."
She paused, her throat working as she swallowed back years of unshed tears.
"Then I woke up in a private clinic outside Albany with an empty womb. Scott told me there had been an ectopic complication. He told me the doctors had to terminate the pregnancy to save my life. I believed him. I spent six months grieving, blaming my own body, apologizing to him for failing to give him a child."
My breath caught. A sickening wave of nausea twisted my stomach.
"He lied?" Brandon asked, his voice shaking with disbelief.
"He didn't just lie," Elena said, her voice cracking. "He paid the clinic director fifteen thousand dollars to falsify the surgical consent forms. He had taken out a key-person corporate insurance policy on me through Apex two weeks prior. The policy had a rider: if the primary trustee suffered a catastrophic reproductive complication that impaired her mental health, executive control of the trust defaulted entirely to the secondary partner. To Scott."
I felt the blood drain from my face so rapidly my vision blurred.
I remembered my own pregnancy. The agonizing complications with the triplets. The bed rest. Scott’s sudden insistence that we switch obstetricians during my sixth month, moving me to a private, out-of-network specialist an hour away from our home.
*“He’s the best in the state, Lauren,”* Scott had insisted, kissing my forehead with cold lips. *“He’s going to make sure nothing goes wrong with our investment.”*
Investment.
He had never used the word *babies*. He had called them *the delivery*, *the timeline*, *the assets*.
And when the emergency C-section happened, Scott hadn't been in the delivery room. He had been in the administrator's office, signing insurance paperwork while I lay paralyzed behind a blue curtain, listening to three tiny cries echo into the sterile air.
"The triplets," I choked out, grabbing Brandon’s arm to keep from falling. "The second insurance policy..."
"Check the manila folder Arthur gave you," Elena said grimly. "The one on the hood of his car. Arthur didn't want to show you the whole document. He only showed you the guarantee page."
Brandon immediately sprinted to his SUV, pulling the folder Arthur had dropped earlier from the front seat. He flipped through the dense legal jargon until his fingers stopped halfway through the packet.
May you like
His face went completely white.
"Lauren," Brandon whispered, looking up at me with terror in his eyes. "Scott didn't just name himself beneficiary. He executed a supplemental policy against the infants' survival."
