CHAPTER - 5: SERENA’S VERSION OF LOVE
Chapter 05 - CHAPTER - 5: SERENA’S VERSION OF LOVE
Serena Voss had come to the funeral dressed like a grieving secret, but grief was not what finally broke her.
Elena looked through the glass wall at Noah, who sat with a nurse making a lopsided paper airplane.
“He still asks for her.”
“She’s his mother.”
“She put him in Victor’s car.”
Bell nodded. “Both can be true.”
That was becoming the theme of Elena’s new life.
Both can be true.
Victor had been charming, and Victor had left her to die.
Adrian had failed to find her, and Adrian had saved her.
Serena might have been manipulated, and Serena might have helped build the road to a cliff.
By afternoon, Adrian’s legal team confirmed the second policy. It was not written directly on the baby. That would have raised flags. It was wrapped inside a private family continuity package tied to Victor’s real estate holding company, triggered by the death of Elena and “loss of expected issue” before delivery.
Expected issue.
Elena had to sit down after reading the phrase.
Her daughter reduced to a clause.
“The broker who placed this should lose his license,” Adrian said.
“He should lose more than that.”
“He may.”
The broker, Owen Laird, had already stopped answering calls. His assistant told Cross Atlantic investigators he was “traveling.” His passport record said otherwise. He had entered Canada at 6:03 that morning in a rented Mercedes.
Victor’s circle was moving.
That meant someone had warned them.
Bell called New York. Adrian called no one, which worried Elena more. Powerful men were most dangerous when they went quiet and began letting other people discover how many doors they controlled.
At 4:40 p.m., Adrian’s private investigator sent the first photograph.
Serena entering Victor and Elena’s townhouse with a black garment bag.
At 5:12, another.
Serena leaving with Elena’s pearl earrings in her ears.
At 5:18, a third.
Serena standing on the townhouse steps, one hand over her stomach.
Elena stared at the image.
“No,” she said.
Bell looked over her shoulder. “What?”
Elena zoomed in.
The gesture was unmistakable. Protective. Deliberate. Too practiced to be casual.
“She’s pregnant.”
Adrian swore under his breath, the kind of old money profanity that still managed to sound formal.
Bell took the phone. “Do we know that?”
“No,” Elena said. “But Victor told me last month he wanted the nursery repainted blue. I told him we were having a girl. He said, ‘Not that one.’ I thought he meant some stupid future son he imagined.”
Now she knew.
Serena was not just the mistress.
She was carrying the replacement family Victor had already started staging.
Elena felt nausea rise, but it did not break her. Strangely, that frightened her. She wondered what kind of woman she was becoming when the news of her husband’s other unborn child made her colder rather than weaker.
Adrian sat beside her. “You don’t have to do this publicly.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Elena.”
“If Serena is pregnant, Victor will use that too. He’ll stand at my funeral and turn himself into a tragic widower with two children to protect. He will make everyone pity him before anyone questions him.”
Bell’s phone rang.
She answered, listened, and looked straight at Elena.
“What?” Elena asked.
Bell ended the call. “Victor moved the funeral up.”
Adrian stood. “When?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
The room went still.
Of course he had. Victor did not like waiting. Waiting gave truth time to find shoes.
Elena placed both hands on her stomach and breathed through a slow tightening low in her back. It was not a contraction, the doctor had told her. Not yet. Stress. Muscle. Her body remembering it had nearly died.
“Then we move tomorrow morning too,” she said.
That evening, Noah finally asked the question everyone had been avoiding.
“Do I have to go back to Mommy?”
Elena was sitting with him by the window, watching rain mist the streetlights outside Adrian’s suite.
She had no legal right to promise him anything.
So she told him the smallest truth she could safely offer.
“Tonight, you stay here.”
He pressed his cheek against her sleeve. “What about tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, we walk into a church.”
“Is Uncle Vic there?”
“Yes.”
Noah’s breathing changed.
Elena touched his hair. “There will be police. Adrian will be there. I will be there. You do not have to say anything unless you want to.”
Noah thought about that.
“Can I wear my green coat?”
“You can wear whatever makes you feel brave.”
He nodded.
“Mommy bought it,” he whispered. “Before she got sad all the time.”
Elena closed her eyes briefly.
There it was again. Both can be true.
At dawn, a nurse braided Elena’s hair because her shoulder injury made it impossible to lift both arms. Adrian waited outside the room while she dressed in gray. Detective Bell checked the route. Dr. Kellan sat with Noah over cereal he did not eat.
Before they left, Adrian handed Elena a small envelope.
“What is this?”
“Your mother’s last letter.”
Elena stared at it.
“I thought you said Margaret told you I died.”
“She did. This one was from Rebecca. It never reached me. My staff found it in an old restricted file last night, attached to a legal hold I did not authorize.”
Elena’s fingers trembled around the envelope.
“Why give it to me now?”
Adrian looked toward the waiting elevator.
“Because Victor is not the only person who used a funeral to bury the truth.”
Serena Voss had learned early that beauty opened doors, but it did not keep them open.
That was the part men like Victor never understood. They thought a woman like Serena floated through life carried by admiration. They did not see the calculations behind her smile, the jobs she took because rent was due, the older executives who called mentorship what everyone else recognized in the elevator.
By thirty, she had a son, no husband, a mother in Ohio who still mailed coupons, and a talent for making wealthy men feel briefly young.
Victor had been different at first.
That was what she would later tell Detective Bell, and Elena would believe her more than she wanted to.
May you like
He was attentive. He remembered Noah’s peanut allergy. He asked Serena what she read. He said Elena and he were separated emotionally, legally soon, financially complicated. He said Elena was fragile, cold, obsessed with legacy. He said she had trapped him with a pregnancy and refused a quiet divorce.
Serena had worn another woman’s pearls to a funeral, but she was about to hand over something far more dangerous.
