Chapter 4: The Investigation
Chapter 4: The Investigation
Neither of us slept that night.
The photograph haunted us.
Who sent it?
Why?
And what exactly was Victoria hiding?
The next morning Graham called the number.
No answer.
Only a text arrived.
Meet me at 2 PM. Come alone.
Against every instinct, we went.
The meeting took place in a small café on the edge of town.
A woman in her sixties sat waiting.
The moment she saw Graham, she stood.
Her eyes filled with emotion.
"You're Graham."
"Who are you?"
The woman swallowed.
"My name is Margaret Collins."
Neither of us recognized it.
But the moment she looked at me, I saw fear.
Not fear of us.
Fear of what she was about to reveal.
"I worked for your family twenty-seven years ago."
Graham frowned.
"As what?"
"Your father's personal assistant."
The color drained from his face.
His father had died when he was young.
Victoria rarely spoke about him.
Margaret slid a thick envelope across the table.
"Your mother spent decades making sure nobody ever saw these."
Inside were photographs.
Letters.
Financial records.
And one document that made Graham stop breathing.
It was a DNA report.
Not for our son.
For Graham himself.
"What is this?" he whispered.
Margaret looked away.
"Your mother knows."
"Knows what?"
The woman's voice cracked.
"Richard Hayes wasn't your biological father."
The world seemed to tilt.
Graham stared at the paper.
His hands shook uncontrollably.
"No."
"It's true."
"That's impossible."
Margaret pushed another document forward.
The laboratory seals.
The signatures.
The dates.
Everything was authentic.
Victoria had spent years worshipping the Hayes bloodline.
Years talking about heritage.
Legacy.
Pure family history.
Yet the biggest secret of all was this:
The man she claimed founded Graham's identity wasn't his biological father.
Everything she built her authority on was a lie.
Suddenly the accusation against our son made sense.
The obsession with genetics.
The fixation on bloodlines.
The desperate attempt to prove something.
She wasn't protecting the Hayes family.
She was protecting herself.
Because if the truth came out, the empire she controlled could collapse overnight.
Then Margaret revealed the final bombshell.
"Victoria recently discovered that someone else knows the truth."
Graham looked up.
"Who?"
Margaret's face turned grim.
"The person who is named in the original DNA records."
The café felt colder.
"Who is he?"
Margaret slowly slid one last photograph across the table.
Graham picked it up.
And nearly dropped it.
The man in the picture wasn't a stranger.
He wasn't dead.
He wasn't missing.
He was someone we both knew.
Someone who had attended family dinners.
Someone Victoria trusted.
Someone who had been standing beside her for years.
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And according to the records...
He was Graham's real father.
