10. Alex
Alex
Belle’s door has been closed for several minutes, and I am still standing in the hallway staring at it as though the wood owes me an answer.
She shut it without a word. No accusation, no parting shot, none of the steel she carried through a ballroom full of strangers tonight. She simply walked into her room and closed me out, and the quiet click of the latch lodged somewhere beneath my ribs.
I hate that she shut me out.
I hate myself more for caring.
My hand lifts before I realize what I am doing.
I could knock.
The idea feels more dangerous than kicking the door in.
I make myself walk to my own side of the suite before I do something unforgivable.
Like beg her to let me in.
By the time I reach my room, the ballroom might as well belong to another city. I loosen my tie, shrug out of my jacket, and stop when something inside the breast pocket shifts against my hand.
Her locket.
The chain slides over my fingers when I draw it out.
She gave it to me before the gala because she wanted nothing from her life visible tonight. No Emma Clarke. No Belle Mitchell. No mother’s locket resting against her throat.
Just a stranger in dark green silk.
I turn the small pendant over in my palm.
Trust is a strange thing to get from a woman who refuses to give me the truth.
I place the locket on the dresser with more care than I use on anything else, strip off my cufflinks and pour a scotch.
Then I call Polanski.
He answers promptly, his voice roughened by the hour but alert. “Mr. Hartley.”
“Anything new on Mark Mitchell?”
“You asked me to find the gaps, and the gaps keep leading back to him.” Papers shift on his end. “What did Valenti give you?”
“Very little.”
“How little?”
“Enough to be irritating.”
Polanski waits.
“Mark’s money trouble comes from gambling debts,” I say.
“Not an occasional bad habit. He was losing enough money to start borrowing privately after the legitimate accounts stopped covering him. Valenti kept steering me toward the debts and the people around them, but every time I asked for names, he stopped.”
“He refused?”
“He said there were things I had to find myself.”
Polanski gives a quiet hum.
“What?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Polanski.”
“It sounds less like a refusal and more like someone trying to point you toward information.”
My jaw tightens.
“That is precisely the kind of game Valenti enjoys.”
“Perhaps. Though he could have pointed you anywhere. But we already knew Mark had money problems. So, at the very least, this isn’t a wild goose chase.”
“He also made it clear he knows more about Belle than he intends to tell me.”
“Did he say why?”
“No.”
I look toward the hallway.
Because Belle told him not to.
I would bet money on it.
She trusted Dante Valenti with whatever she refuses to give me.
That thought has been grinding beneath my skin since the ballroom.
“What else?” Polanski asks.
“There was federal involvement after Mark died.”
“When you say involvement?”
“Valenti would not explain it. Only that the federal government became involved around the aftermath.”
Polanski exhales slowly.
“That changes something.”
“What?”
“The sealed records.”
I straighten.
Months of investigation flash back, the blank stretch before Riverside Falls, the missing filings, the New York history Polanski could trace only to dead ends.
“You told me someone sealed them.”
“I did. At the time, I assumed private litigation, an estate matter, perhaps something connected to the Mitchell business. Wealthy families bury embarrassing records all the time.”
“And now?”
“If federal agencies were involved, the seal may be federal rather than private.”
My gaze moves to the untouched scotch. “That would explain why you couldn’t get through it.”
“It would explain some of it.” Polanski’s voice remains measured. “A sealed federal matter is different from a civil record someone paid to make inconvenient. If that is what we are dealing with, throwing more money at the usual channels will only make people notice someone is asking.”
“So don’t use the usual channels.”
“This is good, I can approach it differently.”
“What can you do?”
“I can start with the edges instead of the seal itself. Which agency arrived, who signed the scene over, what local officers were told to step away, whether there were transportation records or federal warrants filed under related names. Sealed records still leave a paper trail.”
“And now that we know it is a gambling problem, we can track down the bookie.”
“We have a direction now, which is more than what we had yesterday.”
“Good.”
“One thing bothers me.”
I wait.
“You hired me ten years ago to prove Belle Mitchell was responsible for Mark’s death.”
The old certainty tightens automatically inside my chest.
“Yes.”
“If we are now considering that Mark had creditors dangerous enough to frighten his family, I need permission to investigate the possibility that one of them killed him.”
“You have it.”
Polanski pauses before continuing. “That means reopening assumptions we have treated as fact for a decade.”
“I know what it means.”
“Yes, sir.”
There is no judgment in his voice. Somehow that makes it worse.
“I also want everything around Belle and Liam checked,” I say. “If Mark left debts behind and someone has been trying to collect from the people who survived him, I want to know. Calls, letters, unfamiliar accounts, people asking questions around Liam, anything that can be traced back to Mark.”
“The man from the alley?”
“Start there. Contact Valenti, he might give you access.”
“I’ll have his movements reconstructed.”
“And keep Liam’s detail where it is.”
“It hasn’t moved.”
Polanski is too good at his job not to hear what sits behind my words, but he leaves it alone.
“Mr. Hartley.”
“What?”
“If Valenti is deliberately pointing you toward Mark without giving you the answer, there is probably a reason he cannot say more.”
“Or a reason he enjoys watching me work for it.”
“That too.”
Despite myself, my mouth almost moves.
“Call me when you have something.”
“You’ll hear from me as soon as I do.”
I end the call.
The quiet returns.
For ten years, the story had been brutally simple.
Belle wanted the Mitchell money. Mark stood between her and the inheritance. Mark died. Belle disappeared before anyone could stop her. This was the picture the sheriff at Riverside Falls had painted.
I built everything on that sequence.
My hatred.
My search.
Every promise I made to myself about what I would do when I finally found her.
Now the pieces no longer stay where I put them.
I pick up the scotch, hold it for a moment, then set it down without drinking.
It seems more than likely Mark had been drowning long before he died. Maybe the fortune Belle was supposed to inherit was already being eaten alive by gambling losses and private debts.
Maybe the wrong people finally came to collect.
And maybe Belle did not kill him. The thought does not bring relief. It hollows me out.
I brace one hand against the window frame and stare down at Manhattan.
I accused her of murdering the man who had raised her.
I stood in my kitchen and told her she had killed Mark for money. I chose every word because I knew exactly where it would hurt, and when she broke beneath them, some vile part of me felt vindicated.
I wanted her pain.
I wanted proof that ten years had not been easy for her, while mine burned.
What if I was wrong?
My stomach turns.
The question opens a crack in something I have kept sealed for a decade, but guilt is not the worst thing waiting behind it.
Because even if Belle did not kill Mark, she still ran.
She knew something was wrong, enough to take Liam and disappear, enough to call me before my father died. Yet she never came to me.
That is the wound that refuses to close.
If Mark had dragged his family into something dangerous, why did she carry it alone?
Why did she take an eight-year-old boy into the night instead of coming up the road to my house and pounding on the door?
I would have answered. She had an entire family waiting to help her, even if she had stopped believing mine was hers.
All she had to do was ask.
One sentence.
Alex, I need you.
There is no version of my life where I would not have come.
I would have put her and Liam in my truck and driven until she felt safe. I would have emptied every account I had, called every person my father knew, borrowed money I did not have, and fought men I had no business fighting if that was what she needed.
She knew that.
I thought she knew that.
Maybe she did not.
The possibility hurts in a place hatred never reached.
Did she love me and still believe I would fail her? Or did she never love me as much as I loved her?
I close my eyes.
I believed the difference between us did not matter.
She was Belle when she was with me. Not Mitchell Lumber. Not the heiress everyone in Riverside Falls whispered about.
And I was Alex.
Not Thomas Hartley’s son. Not the construction worker with dirt under his fingernails and sawdust in his cuffs.
Just Alex.
Maybe that was only true for me. When everything became dangerous, she might have looked at me and seen what everyone else did—a twenty-two-year-old kid in his father’s work boots, making promises bigger than anything he had ever survived.
Every time I told her I would follow her anywhere, she may have heard a boy who still believed love was enough to keep bullets away.
And when she needed someone capable of protecting her, she decided I wasn’t that man.
My chest tightens.
Where did I fail her?
Did she try to tell me something I missed?
Was she frightened right in front of me while I was too busy planning our future to notice?
Did she think I wanted her money?
That one hurts the most.