Chapter 3 - The Ghost of Five Years Ago
Inside the townhouse, the smell of roasted butternut squash and cinnamon provided a warm, grounding contrast to the storm raging on the other side of our front door.
Maya, my twenty-four-year-old assistant kitchen manager and part-time babysitter, was waiting in the hallway. One look at my face and the three quiet children following behind me told her everything she needed to know.
“Come on, crew,” Maya said cheerfully, clapping her hands together to break the heavy tension. “Who wants apple slices with peanut butter and the new episode of *Bluey*?”
“Me!” Lucas cheered, instantly dropping his dinosaur backpack on the entryway rug.
“I want the red plate,” Sophie stated, already unbuttoning her coat with determined efficiency.
Ethan lingered by the doorway for a second. He looked up at me, his dark eyes solemn. “Mommy? Is the tall man still outside?”
I knelt down, resting my hands on his small shoulders. “He’s outside, Ethan. But he’s not going to hurt us. He just has some grown-up things he needs to sort out. Okay?”
Ethan touched my cheek with a warm, sticky thumb. “Don’t cry, Mommy.”
“I’m not crying, sweet boy,” I lied, smiling through the sting in my eyes. “Go get your snack.”
Once the living room door clicked shut and the cheerful theme song of the cartoon began to play, I walked into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water. My hands were trembling violently. The glass rattled against the granite countertop.
Five years.
For five years, I had convinced myself that Sebastian had simply discarded me. When we first met, I was a twenty-three-year-old culinary student running a tiny catering business, and he was the golden son of the Carter empire. Our romance had been a whirlwind—passionate, intense, and completely intoxicating. But the moment we married, the golden cage had snapped shut.
Margaret Carter, his mother, had never hidden her contempt. To her, I was an opportunist, a girl from a working-class neighborhood whose father had been an auto mechanic and whose mother had cleaned houses. And then came the pregnancy. When the ultrasound revealed not one, but three heartbeats, Margaret hadn't smiled. She had looked at my stomach with the cold calculation of an investor assessing a hostile takeover.
And then the crash happened.
Sebastian had been test-driving a prototype electric freight engine on a private track in Wisconsin when the steering column sheared at eighty miles per hour. The news had flashed across every financial network: *Carter Global Heir in Critical Condition.*
I remembered running through the hospital corridors, my eight-month belly heavy and aching, only to be stopped by four security guards outside the ICU. Julian Vance had handed me a non-disclosure agreement and told me that Margaret had assumed full medical proxy. They flew Sebastian to Zurich on a private medical jet while I was held back by private security.
When I tried to return to our home in Lake Forest, my keycards were dead. My phone had been remotely wiped from the family corporate account. When I went into premature labor from sheer stress, I delivered Ethan, Sophie, and Lucas alone in a county ward, listening to the screams of other mothers through thin plastic curtains, while a social worker asked me if I had enough money to buy formula.
I wiped a rogue tear from my cheek and set the glass down.
Through the kitchen window that overlooked the front yard, I saw him.
Sebastian hadn't left.
He was sitting on the bottom step of my brick porch, his head buried in his hands, completely unprotected against the sub-zero Chicago wind. His bespoke suit was ruined, stained with dust from Vance’s car, and his shoulders were shaking.
I watched him for five long minutes.
Part of me—the wounded, abandoned mother who had counted pennies to buy diapers at the dollar store—wanted to leave him out there until his blood turned to ice. But another part of me, the part that remembered the boy who used to wake up at 5:00 AM just to brew my favorite tea before my morning shifts, couldn't bear it.
I grabbed an old fleece blanket from the coat rack, pulled open the heavy front door, and stepped onto the porch.
The cold hit me instantly. Sebastian lifted his head. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face streaked with tears that had frozen on his stubbled cheeks. He looked completely shattered, a shell of the untouchable corporate titan who controlled half the logistics shipping lanes on the continent.
“Take this,” I said coldly, dropping the blanket onto his lap. “You look ridiculous. The neighbors are going to call the police.”
Sebastian grabbed the blanket, but he didn't wrap it around himself. Instead, he reached out, his fingers brushing against the hem of my jeans.
“Hannah,” he whispered, his voice completely raw. “Please. Tell me what they did to you. Tell me everything.”
I sat down on the wooden bench against the porch wall, keeping a wide distance between us.
“Why does it matter now, Sebastian? You have Olivia. You have your merger. You have your life.”
“I don't give a damn about the merger!” he shouted, the sudden violence in his voice making me flinch. He caught himself, running both hands over his face, dragging his fingers through his hair until it stood on end. “I woke up in a private clinic in Zurich three months after the crash, Hannah. I had four surgeries on my skull. I had metal pins in my hips. I couldn't remember my own phone number for the first six weeks.”
I stared at him, my breath catching in my throat. “What?”
“They told me you were dead,” Sebastian choked out, tears spilling freely over his lashes. “Julian and my mother. They brought me death certificates. They told me you were driving to the hospital when your car was swept into the river during the October floods. They told me they buried you and the babies in a private plot while I was in a medical coma.”
The world seemed to tilt on its axis.
The wind howled through the porch railings, but I barely felt it. My mind spun back to the cold hospital room, the sterile silence, the way Vance had looked at me when he said, *“Mr. Carter has moved on with his life, Hannah. You are a footnote he wishes to forget.”*
“They... they told you we died?” I breathed, the words barely audible.
“For two years, I visited an empty grave in Lake Forest every Sunday,” Sebastian said, his voice breaking into deep, shuddering sobs. “I almost drank myself to death. The only reason Olivia was even around was because her father brought her to Switzerland to manage my physical therapy. She played the devoted friend. She cried with me at the cemetery. My mother swore on her deathbed that Olivia was the only person who could pull me out of the grave I was digging for myself.”
He turned his bloodshot eyes to me, reaching out with an open, pleading palm.
“I didn't marry her, Hannah. The press called her my fiancée, but I never signed a license. I never set a date. Every time I looked at her, I felt like I was betraying you. And then today... I walked into that restaurant to sign the Bennett Media contract, and I saw three children who looked like they were carved out of my own flesh.”
He dropped to his knees on the freezing porch wood, crawling toward my bench until his forehead rested against my knees. The billionaire, the master of industry, was weeping like a child at my feet.
“Five years,” he sobbed, his shoulders violently hitching. “They stole five years of my babies’ lives. They stole five years of you. Hannah... God, Hannah, what did they do to us?”
I sat completely frozen, my hand hovering over his trembling head.
Before I could process the monstrous scale of the Bennett family’s deception, my phone buzzed violently in my pocket.
Then it buzzed again. And again. A rapid, frantic barrage of notifications.
I pulled the phone from my coat.
The screen was flooded with alerts from Twitter, TikTok, and local Chicago news outlets.
A video from The Grand Oak had gone viral fifteen minutes ago. The title trending at number one across the United States made my blood run cold:
***“Billionaire Sebastian Carter Confronted by Ex-Wife with Secret Triplets—Bennett Media Heiress Exposed in Fifteen-Million-Dollar Embezzlement Scandal.”***
Beneath the video, a text message popped up from an unknown number:
May you like
*“If you think you can destroy my family with three bastard children and an illegal recording, Hannah, watch what happens to your precious little kitchen by midnight. Take your kids and leave Illinois, or none of you will make it to morning.”*
***
