She Was Never Just the Billionaire’s Wife (Natasha and Chase) novel Chapter 97

(Nathanial)

The private investigator sits across from me, ruining the aesthetics of my hotel suite.

I pay him three hundred dollars an hour to sit on a silk armchair smelling like an ashtray, mostly because he doesn’t ask stupid questions and he actually delivers.

He slides a manila folder over the glass coffee table.

“You were right to have me run it again,” Padilla says.

“I’ll admit it, the paper trail fooled me the first time. I saw the municipal stamp, checked the county ledger, and called it a day. But when I went back and looked at the actual numbers...”

“Just show me what you found.”

Padilla flips the cover back.

He pulls out a copy of the death certificate and puts it to the side.

I already have one locked in my safe, and every line of it is burned into my retinas.

He pulls out a second sheet of paper. A standard background check printout.

“That certificate I gave you last month,” Padilla says.

He taps a thick, calloused finger against the desk.

“Looks completely legitimate. The physician's signature checks out. The attending nurse exists. Even the hospital ward matches.”

I stare at him. I don't pay him to recap.

“But.”

“But,” Padilla repeats.

“I ran the Social Security number listed under her name. It didn't bounce back to a Nat Bailey.”

He points a cheap plastic pen at the nine digits.

“That number belongs to a twenty-one-year-old college student named Elena Rostova. She actually did die in that exact ward, on that exact day. Someone lifted her SSN, slapped your sister's name on a doctored form, and paid off a clerk to file it in the municipal database.”

The words take a long time to travel from his mouth to my brain.

I look at the digits of the Social Security number until they blur.

I blink hard, forcing the numbers back into sharp relief against the harsh white paper.

“Are you telling me this is a fake?”

“I'm telling you it's a forgery,” Padilla corrects calmly.

“A good one. Expensive. Someone knew exactly what they were doing and how to manipulate the registry. But yes. The girl buried under this paperwork isn't your sister.”

My lungs stop pulling air.

Padilla is already packing his briefcase, snapping the brass locks shut.

He doesn't care about the seismic shift happening in my chest.

He just wants to get to his next billable appointment.

“My sister is alive.” I say it out loud just to hear what it sounds like.

It sounds insane after the few months I’ve just been through.

“There's no legal record of her death,” Padilla says cautiously, standing up.

“That doesn't mean she's breathing. But it means this piece of paper is a lie.”

“Who filed it?”

“Still tracing the money. But it was requested locally. Whoever did it is sitting in this time zone.”

A cold, heavy dread settles in my stomach.

Someone deliberately went to a municipal office, handed over a stack of cash, and buried a twenty-one-year-old college student under my sister's name.

Why? To what end?

My mother dragged me out of California in the middle of the night more than twenty years ago, and I’ve spent my entire life trying to figure out what made her leave my sister behind.

But she wouldn't have the stomach or taste for this kind of calculated, bureaucratic fraud.

She just runs and trembles.

This took planning. This took actual malice.

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