Chapter 3 - I Had Seen That Photo Before

That night, after I got Elisa home and finally calmed her enough to sleep, I sat alone at my kitchen table and looked at the contents of the envelope again.

The prenatal test result was clear enough.

Lucinda Vale. Positive. Estimated gestational age: just over nine weeks.

That alone was enough to destroy a wedding.

But it was the photograph that kept my stomach tight.

It wasn’t a formal portrait.

It was a printed still image—grainy, but clear enough.

A candid shot of me in a dark hotel hallway, wearing the same charcoal jacket I’d worn to the Barrett Foundation gala at the Harbor Crest Hotel two months earlier. I wasn’t looking at the camera. I was half turned, like someone had captured me on security footage.

My blood ran cold.

I remembered that night.

At least, I remembered pieces of it.

I had attended the gala alone because Elisa had been staying with my sister. Lucinda had been there too, though back then she was only Preston’s fiancée, still working hard to charm his family and every donor in the room.

I remembered one champagne toast.

I remembered feeling strangely lightheaded afterward.

Then I remembered almost nothing.

At the time, I blamed exhaustion. Work had been brutal. Elisa had been sick the week before. I had told myself I simply hit a wall, let hotel staff call me a car, and stumbled home.

But the image in my hand said I hadn’t gone straight home.

Someone had photographed me in that hallway.

And Lucinda’s prenatal test was dated exactly nine weeks after that gala.

I stared at both papers until dawn.

By morning, one ugly possibility had taken shape so clearly I could no longer ignore it:

Lucinda had not panicked because I might embarrass her wedding.

She had panicked because the envelope connected her pregnancy to me.

I didn’t know if the connection was real.

I didn’t know if I was being framed.

And I didn’t know why my photograph had been hidden with her medical record inside an antique vase on her wedding day.

But I knew one thing with absolute certainty.

That envelope had not been thrown together by accident.

Someone wanted those two pieces seen together.

And maybe the most frightening part of all was this:

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That someone might have been Lucinda herself.

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