Chapter 2 - The Stolen Years
I snatched the forged letter back from Noelle's hands.
"What did you just say?" I asked, my voice dangerously low.
Noelle quickly adjusted her expression, replacing her cruel smile with a mask of innocent confusion.
"I just meant it is so clumsy of someone to drop trash in a public park, sweetheart."
I knew instantly that she was lying to my face.
I turned my back on the woman I was supposed to marry in three days and sprinted out of the park.
I reached my car, threw myself into the driver's seat, and looked closely at the envelope.
There was a faded return address printed in the top left corner.
I drove across Philadelphia like a madman, breaking every speed limit to reach a rundown apartment building in South Philly.
I pounded my fist against the peeling paint of apartment 4B.
The door slowly creaked open, revealing Rachel holding a crying little girl with my exact gray eyes.
Rachel tried to slam the door in my face, but I wedged my foot inside the frame.
"Rachel, please just listen to me for one minute," I begged, tears stinging my eyes.
"You have no right to be here after what you did to us, Evan," she sobbed.
I held up the forged letter and shoved it through the crack in the door.
"I never wrote this, Rachel, I swear on my life I never saw this until you dropped it today."
Rachel stopped pushing against the door and stared at the paper in disbelief.
"If you didn't write it, then who wired two million dollars into my bank account to pay for my silence?" she asked.
She pulled out a wrinkled bank statement from her pocket and handed it to me.
May you like
I looked at the massive wire transfer, but it wasn't the amount that made me feel sick.
The authorizing signature on the transfer belonged to Noelle's father.
