Chapter 2 - THE THIRTY-THREE RETURNED LETTERS
The cabin pressure seemed to drop to zero. The low, white-noise rumble of the twin jet engines vibrating through the fuselage of Flight 418 couldn’t drown out the roaring inside my skull.
"Why didn't you tell me, Jessi?" My voice was cracked, raw, stripped clean of the smooth baritone that had dominated glass boardrooms across five continents. "You left three years ago without a note, without a forwarding address. And now you sit here and tell me I have two children who fought for their lives in an incubator while I was running earnings calls?"
Jessi flinched, but the vulnerability vanished within a heartbeat, replaced by a wall of sheer, hardened ice. Her knuckles turned bone-white where she gripped Maya’s faded stuffed rabbit.
"I didn't tell you?" she whispered, her voice shaking with an indignation so sharp it sliced right through my chest. "You have the audacity to sit here in your Italian wool coat and ask me why I didn't tell you?"
"Mommy?" Leo murmured, shifting against the armrest, his eyelids heavy.
"Shh, baby. Go back to sleep," she whispered, her hand gently smoothing his sandy hair. Once the boy’s breathing evened out again, she reached under the seat in front of her, unzipped an overstuffed, frayed canvas diaper bag, and pulled out a heavy bundle wrapped tightly in a thick rubber band.
She dropped it directly onto my lap.
The impact felt like lead.
"Count them, Luca," she hissed under her breath, leaning in so close I could smell the familiar lavender soap she had used since college, tainted now by the stale air of coach. "Go on. Count them. Thirty-three. One for every month since the day I found out I was pregnant in that tiny clinic off Pike Place."
I picked up the stack. My fingers were trembling—an involuntary tremor I hadn't experienced since Chloe died. The top envelope was creased, yellowed at the corners, addressed in Jessi’s familiar, loopy, left-handed handwriting.
Luca Vance. Personal & Confidential.
Vance Global Tower, Penthouse Level, Suite 9000, Seattle, WA.
Stamped across the center in violent red postal ink were three words: RETURN TO SENDER. REFUSED.
"I didn't just write to your office," Jessi said, tears finally catching the harsh overhead light of the cabin. "I wrote to your personal penthouse. I sent three to your estate on Mercer Island. When Maya went into respiratory failure at six weeks old, I swallowed every ounce of pride I had left and sent an overnight courier with a certified demand for a DNA test, begging you to just look at their medical charts. It came back marked 'Addressee Unknown; Unsolicited Harassment Notice Filed.'"
"That’s impossible," I breathed, flipping frantically through the envelopes. "Jessi, I swear to God on Chloe's grave, I never saw a single one of these. My mail is routed through executive intake, but anything marked personal—"
"Stop lying, Luca!" she snapped, her voice rising just enough to turn the heads of a couple across the aisle. She caught herself, biting her lower lip until it almost bled. "Just stop. You chose your father’s empire. You chose the Carlyle merger. You made it very clear what would happen if I disrupted your trajectory."
"What trajectory? What are you talking about?"
"The cease-and-desist order," she whispered, pulling a final, folded legal document from the bottom of the bundle. "Sent sixty days after my first letter. Delivered by a private process server to my mother's hospice room while she was taking her final breaths. It warned me that if I ever attempted to contact you, Vance Global would tie me up in frivolous defamation litigation until I lost custody of my unborn children to the state."
I unfolded the paper. My vision blurred.
It was printed on heavy Vance Global legal stationery. It cited non-disclosure violations, parental fraud, and extortion. At the bottom was the signature of the legal representative acting under power of attorney for the Vance Family Trust.
The ink was dark blue, signed with an ornate, flourish-heavy hand.
It wasn't my father’s signature. My father had suffered his stroke four years ago; his hand could barely hold a spoon, let alone sign a legal instrument.
It was Flynn Vance.
My cousin. My chief operating officer. The man who had sat across from me at breakfast three days ago and told me he had restructured my private trust to protect my assets during the Sterling acquisition.
"Flynn," I muttered, the name tasting like ash.
"Don't pretend you didn't know," Jessi said, her voice hollow. "Flynn told me everything. He came to the hospital when the twins were in the NICU. He stood outside the glass, Luca. He looked at two babies wired to machines, handed me a check for fifty thousand dollars, and told me that if I ever tried to bring 'bastards' into the Vance bloodline, you would take them from me and bury me in a psychiatric ward."
My blood turned to pure liquid fire. The cabin of the plane seemed to warp around me. "Flynn said that to you?"
"He showed me your signature, Luca! He showed me an email from your personal account authorizing him to handle the 'Sterling nuisance'!"
Before I could answer, my phone in my jacket pocket began to vibrate incessantly against my ribs. In-flight Wi-Fi had just reconnected as we passed 10,000 feet.
A notification banner popped up:
FLYNN VANCE: STERLING BOARD RECONVENING AT 11:15 P.M. MST IN DENVER. ARDEN CARE HAS SUBMITTED A FINAL REVISED BID OF $810M. IF YOU ARE NOT AT THE BROWN PALACE HOTEL BY 11:30 TO SIGN THE WAIVER, ARDEN BUYS THE PATENTS AND HARBORLIGHT IS DISMANTLED.
I stared at the screen, then down at Jessi’s lap.
"Jessi," I asked slowly, the puzzle pieces slamming together in a catastrophic pattern. "What was your father's company before he died two years ago?"
Jessi looked at me with deep, bitter confusion. "You know what it was. He was an engineer. He spent his life savings developing a pediatric vital tracking algorithm."
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"What was the name of the holding company, Jessi?"
She narrowed her eyes. "Sterling Medical Analytics."
