“Why?”
His expression changed.
“Because the crash that killed Mom and Dad was not an accident.”
My anger stopped.
Our parents had died fifteen years earlier.
I was nineteen.
Noah was twenty-one.
Their car left a mountain road outside Bellmere.
Noah had been with them.
He survived with catastrophic spinal injuries.
Doctors initially told us he might never walk again.
Apparently they had been wrong.
Noah sat beside me on the concrete platform.
“I regained movement during private rehabilitation eighteen months after the crash.”
“And told no one.”
“I intended to tell you.”
“Fourteen years ago?”
“Yes.”
“What changed?”
“Someone entered my rehabilitation room at two in the morning.”
I stared.
“A nurse saw him.”
“He ran.”
“Security found a syringe in the stairwell.”
My skin went cold.
“Noah…”
“I started asking questions about Mom and Dad’s crash.”
He pulled a waterproof phone from his jacket.
“There were inconsistencies.”
“Parts replaced before investigators examined the car.”
“A mechanic who vanished.”
“Insurance photographs with timestamps that didn’t match the official file.”
“And then I found something else.”
He showed me a photograph.
Adrian.
Years before our wedding.
Standing outside a private terminal beside his father.
Adrian had always claimed his father cut him off financially after a bitter family dispute.
His father was an industrialist who had competed against Mercer Holdings for decades.
“Noah…”
“Adrian was never estranged from him.”
The rain continued above us.
I barely heard it.
Noah looked at me.
“I think Adrian was placed in your path.”
I felt sick.
We met at a fundraiser.
He accidentally spilled champagne near my dress.
Apologized.
Found me later.
Sent flowers.
Waited weeks to ask me to dinner.
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