CHAPTER 2 — THE NAME MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
For several seconds, I could hear nothing except rain striking the courthouse steps.
Jonathan’s driver groaned against the pavement. Security guards surrounded the black Mercedes. Nathaniel Cross stood beside me with one hand resting on his silver-tipped cane and the other holding his coat closed around my swollen body.
His threat still hung in the cold air.
Jonathan stared at him through the open car door.
“You can’t do this,” he stammered. “You can’t assault my employees and threaten me in front of a courthouse.”
Nathaniel finally looked at him.
“I haven’t assaulted anyone.”
His gaze moved toward Jonathan’s driver, who had stopped struggling.
“My security team restrained a man who attempted to drive a vehicle toward a pregnant woman standing on a pedestrian plaza.”
“That’s a lie!”
A courthouse surveillance camera rotated above us with a quiet mechanical click.
Nathaniel lifted one eyebrow.
“Then I suppose the footage will support you.”
Jonathan’s mouth closed.
Beside him, Vanessa Vale—his mistress, his assistant, and now apparently the proud wearer of my mother’s necklace—clutched the emerald pendant against her chest.
Nathaniel noticed.
His expression changed instantly.
The calm vanished from his face.
“Where did you get that necklace?”
Vanessa blinked.
“This?”
Her fingers tightened around the chain.
“Jonathan gave it to me.”
Nathaniel stepped closer to the Mercedes.
For the first time, I saw something dangerous beneath his polished exterior. Not anger exactly. Recognition.
“That necklace belonged to Eleanor Cross.”
My heart stopped.
The rain seemed to disappear.
“My mother’s name was Eleanor,” I whispered.
Nathaniel slowly turned toward me.
“I know.”
A painful tightening gripped my stomach.
I gasped and bent forward.
Nathaniel caught me before I could fall.
“Grace?”
“It’s just a contraction.”
His face drained of color.
“How long have you been having them?”
“I haven’t.”
Another sharp pain traveled across my lower back.
I tried to breathe through it, but the courthouse steps blurred.
Nathaniel barked an order over his shoulder.
“Call Dr. Hart. Tell the hospital we’re coming.”
Jonathan climbed halfway out of the Mercedes.
“She’s being dramatic. She always does this when she wants attention.”
Nathaniel’s head snapped toward him.
Jonathan froze.
A security guard opened the rear door of the armored SUV while Nathaniel guided me down the steps.
Before I reached the vehicle, I turned back toward Vanessa.
“That necklace is mine.”
She smirked, though fear trembled beneath it.
“You signed away everything.”
“No,” Nathaniel said.
His voice was quiet now.
“She did not.”
Jonathan scoffed.
“The judge ruled ten minutes ago.”
“The judge ruled based on the information you submitted.”
Nathaniel’s eyes moved between Jonathan and his attorney.
“Information that may soon be proven fraudulent.”
Jonathan’s lawyer, Richard Crowe, stepped out from beneath the courthouse awning.
His expensive gray suit was already darkened by rain.
“Mr. Cross, you have no legal standing in this divorce.”
Nathaniel smiled.
It was not a pleasant smile.
“I have more standing than you can imagine.”
He helped me into the SUV.
As the door began to close, Jonathan shouted after us.
“Grace! You signed the NDA!”
Nathaniel placed himself between me and the open door.
“She signed it under coercion, minutes after a judicial ruling, while eight months pregnant and threatened with false criminal charges.”
He looked directly at Richard Crowe.
“You should start worrying about your license.”
The door shut.
Inside the vehicle, warmth surrounded me. Soft amber lighting glowed along the ceiling. A woman in a dark medical uniform immediately checked my pulse and blood pressure.
Nathaniel sat across from me.
Up close, he looked older than the photographs I had seen in business magazines. His dark hair was silver at the temples. A thin scar crossed the side of his jaw. His cane rested against his knee, though I noticed he gripped it harder whenever the vehicle turned.
I stared at him.
“Who are you?”
“Nathaniel Cross.”
“I know your name.”
My voice cracked.
“I want to know why you knew my mother.”
He looked toward the rain streaking across the window.
“Because Eleanor was my younger sister.”
The contraction released.
A different pain took its place.
I shook my head.
“That’s impossible.”
“It isn’t.”
“She never had a brother.”
“She did.”
“She grew up in foster care.”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Nathaniel leaned forward.
“Your mother was raised in the Cross family estate in Connecticut. She attended private schools in Manhattan. She studied classical music in Paris. She had a trust fund, a family name, and a brother who spent twenty-three years looking for her.”
My breath became shallow.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Nathaniel’s expression tightened.
“It will.”
I pressed one hand against my stomach.
“My mother worked nights at a grocery store. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment. She died when I was seven.”
“I know.”
His voice broke on the final word.
For a moment, the billionaire disappeared.
He was simply a man carrying old grief.
“How did she die?” he asked.
“A car accident.”
“Where?”
“Outside Cedar Falls.”
“What date?”
I told him.
Nathaniel closed his eyes.
His knuckles turned white around the cane.
“That was the night I almost found her.”
A coldness that had nothing to do with the rain moved through me.
“Almost?”
He nodded.
“I had received a message from her three days earlier. The first communication she had sent our family in nearly nine years.”
“What did it say?”
“That she was in danger. That someone had discovered she had a daughter.”
My hand moved protectively over my baby.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Nathaniel reached inside his coat and removed an old photograph.
He handed it to me carefully.
The picture showed two children standing beside a lake. A boy of perhaps twelve held a wooden sailboat. Beside him stood a little girl with dark curls and bright green eyes.
My eyes.
My mother’s eyes.
On the back, written in faded blue ink, were the words:
Nate and Ellie, summer at Hawthorne Lake.
My fingers trembled.
Nathaniel watched me.
“She disappeared when she was twenty-two,” he said. “She emptied none of her accounts. She took no clothes. She left behind her passport, her jewelry, and every photograph except one.”
“Which one?”
“The photograph of our mother wearing the emerald necklace.”
My gaze dropped to the empty space at my throat.
The necklace had always been the only valuable object my mother owned.
“She told me it came from a thrift store.”
“She lied to protect you.”
Nathaniel’s voice hardened.
“That emerald is part of a set created for the Cross family in 1912. It contains a microscopic identification mark beneath the clasp. There is no question that Vanessa Vale is wearing stolen property.”
The SUV accelerated through the rain.
I looked back toward the courthouse disappearing behind us.
“Why did Jonathan take it?”
“I intend to find out.”
A doctor’s voice came through the vehicle’s speaker system. The medical assistant answered questions about my contractions.
Nathaniel continued studying me.
“How long were you married to him?”
“Three years.”
“And when did he begin controlling your money?”
My shame returned.
“Before the wedding.”
“Did you have independent counsel review the prenuptial agreement?”
“He said his lawyer would explain everything.”
Nathaniel’s jaw tightened.
“Richard Crowe?”
I nodded.
“Crowe represented Jonathan?”
“He said he represented both of us.”
“That is not how independent counsel works.”
Nathaniel leaned back.
“What else did Jonathan control?”
“My phone. My medical appointments. The car. Our accounts.”
“Did he ever prevent you from contacting people?”
“There was no one to contact.”
“You had no friends?”
“I did before we married.”
“What happened to them?”
I thought about the unanswered messages. The arguments Jonathan created whenever I planned lunch with someone. The way he quietly convinced me that every person in my life envied me or used me.
“They stopped calling.”
Nathaniel’s face became unreadable.
“They may not have stopped willingly.”
The hospital came into view through the windshield.
Before we entered the emergency bay, Nathaniel spoke again.
“Grace, there is something else you need to know.”
The SUV slowed.
“I did not find you by accident.”
My throat tightened.
“How did you find me?”
“One month ago, Cross Meridian’s private security division detected an attempted sale of a restricted family heirloom.”
“The necklace?”
“Yes.”
“Our investigator traced the seller to a private account connected to Jonathan Blackwell.”
The doors opened outside the maternity entrance.
Nathaniel remained seated.
“While investigating him, we discovered your name.”
He handed me a thin black folder.
Inside was a copy of my birth certificate.
My name was printed correctly.
So was my mother’s.
But the space beside Father was not blank, as it had been on the copy I grew up with.
A name had been typed there.
Alexander Cross.
I looked up.
Nathaniel’s expression carried a horror deeper than anything I had yet understood.
“That name should never have appeared on your certificate,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because Alexander Cross was not your father.”
“Then who was he?”
Nathaniel swallowed.
“Our father.”
The folder slipped from my hands.
If the document was genuine, it made no biological sense.
Unless someone had deliberately placed my grandfather’s name on my birth certificate.
Someone powerful enough to alter records.
Someone desperate to hide the identity of my real father.
The medical team reached into the vehicle to help me out.
As I gripped Nathaniel’s arm, another contraction tore through me.
This one was stronger.
The doctor looked at the monitor and immediately frowned.
“Her blood pressure is dangerously high.”
Nathaniel rose beside me.
The doctor turned toward the emergency doors.
“Get obstetrics down here now.”
As they rushed me inside, I heard Nathaniel speak into his phone.
His voice was cold and precise.
“Lock down every Cross Meridian account connected to Blackwell Holdings.”
He paused.
“And find out who changed Grace’s birth certificate.”
The doors swung shut behind us.
May you like
I did not yet know that before morning, the man who altered that document would be found dead inside a locked office.
And the last number he had called belonged to my ex-husband.
