Chapter 5 - WHO WAS MY BIOLOGICAL FATHER?The trust answered who my mother was.
Not my father.
Eleanor’s birth file listed him as unknown.
My parents knew only one first name.
Thomas.
That could mean anyone.
Then Marcus found his mother’s letters.
Franklin had stored them in a locked cabinet.
Why?
Maybe leverage.
Maybe obsession.
One letter was written to my grandparents.
Please tell Evelyn that her father was not a stranger and he did not abandon her.
My chest tightened.
Another:
Thomas has agreed to stay away because Franklin threatened Marcus.
Then a surname.
Thomas Avery.
My father—Richard—went still when he heard it.
“You know him?”
“Yes.”
Thomas Avery had been an early executive at Carter Meridian.
My grandfather’s protégé.
Dead now.
He later founded Avery Medical Logistics.
A company Carter Meridian acquired years ago.
I suddenly laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because apparently every family secret eventually became a corporate chart.
Thomas Avery had a daughter from a later marriage.
Celeste Avery.
Which meant I had another half-sibling.
Somewhere outside this disaster.
But the paternity mattered for something else.
Thomas had transferred assets into a sealed trust shortly before his death.
No named public beneficiary.
Only:
For E.B.’s daughter, if she is ever free to claim it.
The trust contained minority interests in several medical-distribution companies.
Including shares later rolled into Bellstone partnerships.
The ownership situation became even more tangled.
My existence had been woven into both sides of the business from birth.
That was why Franklin needed me erased.
Not just because I represented Eleanor’s affair.
Because legally, I carried claims through both Eleanor and Thomas.
Two bloodlines.
May you like
Two sets of assets.
One unwanted child.
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