Chapter 3 - “The Ghost in the Archives”
The rain lashed violently against the towering glass windows of Ethan's private penthouse suite overlooking the Chicago skyline.
Inside, the lights were off, save for the pale, flickering glow of the city lights reflecting off the wet pavement below.
Ethan sat alone at his massive mahogany desk.
Scattered across the polished wood were the items Anna Miller had left behind.
The black-and-white photograph of a young Richard standing outside a county hospital with a bundled infant.
The yellowed envelope marked with faded stamps.
And the letters.
Ethan's hands shook as he pulled the first folded sheet of paper from the envelope.
The paper was fragile, yellowed with age, and smelled faintly of old dust and dried lavender.
He unfolded it.
There, scrawled in clumsy, oversized seven-year-old handwriting, were words that broke his heart.
“Dear Mom,
I hope you are having a nice day. Dad says you live far away in the clouds, but I drew you a picture so you wouldn't forget me. Why can't I visit you? I miss you so much.
Love, Ethan.”
A tear slipped from Ethan's eye, tracking silently down his cheek to land directly on the faded ink.
For twenty-nine years, Richard Bellmont had meticulously crafted a narrative.
He had told Ethan that his biological mother had died of a sudden illness when he was a toddler, a tragic loss that justified why Richard had raised him alone before eventually marrying Caroline.
Ethan had grown up feeling a quiet, hollow ache in his chest, believing he was motherless, striving endlessly to earn his cold, exacting father's approval to fill that void.
Now, looking at the childish drawing of a smiling woman attached to the letter, Ethan realized the entire architecture of his life was a meticulously constructed prison of deceit.
His phone buzzed relentlessly on the desk.
Missed calls from Victoria.
Missed calls from Caroline.
And a dozen urgent, demanding voicemails from Richard Bellmont.
Ethan ignored them all.
Instead, he opened his laptop, typing into the search engine the only name that mattered now.
Anna Miller.
For a long time, the digital records yielded nothing—or rather, they yielded too little.
A sparse public record footprint.
A small apartment lease in a declining industrial suburb thirty miles outside Chicago, renewed annually for nearly three decades.
No major credit history.
No high-paying career.
Just a quiet, invisible ghost living on the absolute margins of the society Richard Bellmont ruled like a king.
Ethan dug deeper, utilizing his corporate executive access privileges to run a deeper legal and financial background trace on the address.
What he found made his blood run cold.
Property records showed that the small apartment where Anna Miller had lived for nearly thirty years was owned by a shell corporation.
Tracing that shell corporation upward through three layers of offshore holding entities led to a single ultimate beneficiary.
Bellmont Real Estate Holdings.
Richard Bellmont hadn't just paid her off and walked away twenty-nine years ago.
He had kept her under constant, quiet surveillance, maintaining a leash on her life for nearly three decades to ensure she never dared to cross the threshold of his fabricated world.
The door to the penthouse office clicked open.
Heavy, hurried footsteps echoed across the hardwood floor.
Ethan didn't look up as the office doors swung wide open, revealing Richard Bellmont standing in the doorway, soaked from the rain and breathing heavily.
“Ethan,” Richard said, his voice tight with a mixture of panic and suppressed fury. “Turning off your phone and hiding out in your penthouse like a petulant child does not solve this.”
Ethan slowly raised his head.
In the dim light of the penthouse, Ethan looked less like Richard's obedient son and more like a mirror image of the ruthless man standing before him.
“You bought her apartment building, Dad,” Ethan said quietly.
Richard froze, the defensive retort dying on his lips.
“You didn't just pay her to disappear,” Ethan continued, standing up slowly from his leather chair. “You imprisoned her in plain sight. Every apartment lease, every utility bill, every restricted movement—you kept her on a financial chokehold for twenty-nine years.”
Richard stepped into the room, closing the door behind him with a heavy click.
“You don't understand the complexities of what happened back then, Ethan,” Richard argued, his voice lowering into a desperate, pleading tone. “Anna Miller was nobody. She was a naive twenty-year-old art student from a broken family with zero resources. If our family name had been dragged into a custody scandal in the mid-nineties, it would have destroyed Bellmont Real Estate before it ever became a multi-billion-dollar empire. I protected you. I gave you wealth, power, a legacy—”
“You stole my mother!” Ethan roared, slamming his fist onto the mahogany desk with a force that rattled the glass lamp.
Richard flinched, stepping back.
“You told me she was dead,” Ethan whispered, his voice trembling with a terrifying, controlled rage. “Every time I cried for her as a little boy, every time I looked at pictures of other families, you looked me in the eye and lied. You used my love for a ghost to turn me into the obedient corporate soldier you wanted.”
“I am your father,” Richard hissed, his own temper finally flaring through the cracks of his composure. “Everything you have, everything you stand on—it belongs to the Bellmont name. If you tear this apart over a woman who abandoned you—”
“She didn't abandon me!” Ethan shouted, throwing the yellowed letters across the room at his father's feet. “Read them! Read what I wrote to her when I was seven years old, while you were paying accountants to make sure she couldn't come within ten miles of me!”
Richard looked down at the scattered papers on the floor, his face turning an ash-gray color.
He didn't bend down to pick them up.
“It's done, Ethan,” Richard said coldly, straightening his jacket. “The past is buried. You have a wedding to salvage, a company to run, and a legacy to uphold. You will forget this woman by morning, or you will find out very quickly what happens when a Bellmont loses everything.”
May you like
Ethan stared at his father, the last shred of filial loyalty evaporating from his heart entirely.
“My wedding is canceled, Dad,” Ethan said softly, a cold, dangerous smile touching the corners of his mouth. “And the legacy you built? I'm going to tear it down brick by brick until you're standing in the exact same ruins you left my mother in twenty-nine years ago.”
