Chapter 10 - BLOOD
I read the report three times before my mind accepted the words.
Probability of half-sibling relationship: 99.2%.
Julian Vance.
Serena Rollins.
My husband.
My brother’s wife.
Not just lovers.
Blood.
For a long moment no one in Nora’s office spoke.
Then Adrian said, very quietly, “That’s impossible.”
It felt impossible because all the obvious explanations had already been used up. The affair was scandal. The Harbor scheme was motive. The conservatorship plan was control. But this—this made the panic in the hospital, the warning about the red folder, Serena’s terror, all of it snap into a more grotesque shape.
Nora turned the report over.
Attached behind it was a private investigative memorandum.
Not complete. Not signed. But enough.
Julian had commissioned a quiet paternity review two years earlier after discovering letters among his late father’s things. The memorandum suggested that Serena’s mother, Elaine Rollins, had been involved decades earlier with Julian’s father, Charles Vance.
Meaning Serena and Julian had discovered they were half-siblings before or during the affair.
Adrian stood up so abruptly his chair crashed back.
“She knew?”
I looked at the notation dates.
“The test is eight months old.”
He shut his eyes.
Eight months.
About the same time Adrian’s memory issues worsened.
About the same time Serena began pushing harder for “rest” and “oversight.”
About the same time Julian’s Harbor drafts appeared.
Nora’s voice was level, but I heard the strain in it. “This does not just create scandal. It creates leverage. If Serena’s marriage collapsed publicly, if the affair became public, if the half-sibling relationship became public, both of them would have enormous incentive to suppress anything tying them together financially.”
I thought of the dock. The medication. The lies told to Adrian. The private sponsor of silence built out of shame.
Adrian was breathing too fast.
“Sit down,” I said.
“No.”
“Adrian.”
“She let me sleep beside her knowing that?”
The pain in his voice nearly split the room.
I crossed to him and gripped his arm. “I know.”
“No, you don’t.” He laughed once, choked and furious. “You were married to him. I brought her into the family. I defended both of them.”
Nora stepped in with the mercy of logistics. “We move now. Quietly, and only where necessary. The paternity report is relevant because it shows motive and coercive leverage. We do not blast it publicly unless counsel determines it is legally necessary.”
I nodded.
Adrian stared at the paper one last time, then turned away.
The central truth, once revealed, made the earlier pieces crueler rather than simpler. Julian and Serena had not just betrayed their spouses. They had discovered they were bound by blood, hidden it, continued anyway, and then built a campaign of medication, manipulation, and financial control around the brother-husband most likely to expose them.
By afternoon, we had a new strategy.
First: Adrian would submit to independent toxicology and neurocognitive evaluation from physicians outside Harbor.
Second: Nora would petition for immediate injunctions against both Julian and Serena related to Harbor governance and document destruction.
Third: we would locate the witness from the marina report.
Fourth: we would secure the laptop from locker 414.
I was packing the red folder back into a legal box when the laptop imaging finished enough for the technician to open a recovered chat archive.
May you like
The first visible message was from Serena to Julian, sent the morning after the boating accident:
He remembers your voice on the dock. If Elena gets him alone too long, we lose everything.
