Chapter 5 - Shadows on the AsphaltBy February, Julian had fired two private investigators and hired a boutique corporate intelligence firm headquartered in Virginia. He had spent nearly two hundred thousand dollars to trace a ghost.
He spent his evenings alone in the vast penthouse, unable to focus on the board packets or the merger documents Genevieve brought to his office. Genevieve had quickly realized that the ghost of Amy hung heavier in Julian’s rooms than her living presence ever had. Whenever Genevieve tried to sit by the fire or rearrange the orchids on the dining table, Julian’s eyes would drift toward the vacant chair near the window.
"You're obsessed, Julian," Genevieve snapped one evening, setting down her wine glass. "She walked out. She abandoned you. Why are you humiliating yourself running credit checks on every women’s shelter from Maine to Florida?"
"She didn't abandon me," Julian said, his eyes hollow, dark hollows bruised beneath them. "She escaped. There's a difference."
"And what if she did? You have a company to steer. You have obligations."
"You don't understand," Julian murmured, staring at the empty mantle where Amy’s framed watercolor sketches once sat. He had thrown them out in a fit of rage in November, and now he would have paid ten million dollars to have a single scrap of her paper back. "She left everything. Her clothes, her jewelry, her family heirlooms. She left a twenty-million-dollar trust without taking a penny. A person who does that isn't running for leverage. She was suffocating."
The private detective’s phone call came at two in the morning.
"We picked up a paper trail," the voice on the other end reported. "A certified birth-worker registration filed in Beaufort County, North Carolina, requesting midwifery care under the name Amelia Vance-Cole. The SSN used for the health voucher traced back to a secondary dependent file flagged in your family foundation's old records."
Julian stood up so fast his chair screeched against the hardwood. "Where is she?"
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"Cape Haven. A fishing town on the sound. Population twelve hundred."
"Send the car," Julian said, his voice trembling with an adrenaline he hadn't felt in months. "No. Have the pilot prep the turboprop for the regional strip in New Bern. I'm going myself."
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