Vanessa turned toward the back hall. “There may be a third choice.”
She removed a folded photograph from inside her coat.
“I took this from the safe-deposit box before Daniel could see it.”
The image showed four people standing beside a lake.
Richard Mercer was unmistakable.
Beside him stood Marcus Vale’s father.
My father appeared younger, smiling at someone beyond the camera.
The fourth person was a woman holding a baby.
I recognized Eleanor Mercer from Daniel’s old family albums.
But the infant in her arms could not have been Daniel. The date printed beneath the photograph was two years before he was born.
On the back, written in my father’s handwriting, were seven words:
Claire must never learn whose child this is.
I stared at the baby’s face.
A small crescent-shaped birthmark curved beneath the infant’s left ear.
My hand rose instinctively to the identical mark hidden beneath my hair.
