Chapter 15 - Julian Had Been Talking to Me When I Wasn’t There
Julian watched the warehouse video three times.
Then he sat down.
“I thought you were sleepwalking.”
“What?”
“Three times in the last year, you came into my study late at night. You asked about Blackwood debt. Dad’s passwords. The Vale agreements.”
“I never did that.”
“I know now.”
“Didn’t you notice I sounded different?”
“I thought you were angry.”
“That is a terrible answer.”
“I have a collection.”
I almost smiled.
Then I remembered thirty.
The smile died.
Vanessa joined us under guard. She identified the woman in the photograph.
“Her name is Mara Voss.”
“Who is she?”
“My father’s fixer.”
“She looks like me.”
“She looks like anyone he pays her to look like.”
Lucas muttered, “That sentence should not exist.”
Vanessa ignored him.
“Mara met Julian as you. She met bankers as Lucas. She met Arthur as Marcus.”
I turned to Marcus on the video call.
“Is that why you disappeared?”
“Yes. Reginald had a Marcus profile too.”
Now even absence could be forged.
We traced Mara’s access badge to a private medical facility owned by Vale Health.
The same facility where Lucas had spent his final rehab stay nine years earlier.
He went quiet.
“What happened there?” I asked.
“I don’t remember three weeks of it.”
Marcus closed his eyes.
That was answer enough.
They had not simply copied Lucas after he became powerful.
They copied him while he was vulnerable.
Before Northstar existed.
Which meant Reginald had expected Lucas to matter years before Lucas himself did.
We accessed the facility’s old patient list.
Lucas Hart.
Admitted under addiction treatment.
Beneath his name was another patient.
Henry Hart.
Admission date: three days after my father’s official death.
I asked Julian to describe the nights the false Evelyn entered his study.
He looked embarrassed.
“What?” I asked.
“She was kinder than you had been lately.”
The sentence hurt in a way I did not expect.
“Meaning?”
“She asked about work. She touched my shoulder. She said she was sorry we had become distant.”
I stared at him.
“And you never thought it was strange?”
“I wanted it to be true.”
There it was again.
The danger of wanting.
Vanessa had wanted her father’s approval.
Julian had wanted a version of me who made him comfortable.
Lucas had wanted distance to equal safety.
Marcus had wanted secrecy to equal protection.
Everyone had built a private reality around what they needed.
“What did you tell her?”
Julian closed his eyes.
“Enough.”
He described passwords, debt schedules, Arthur’s private meetings.
Not because the impersonator forced him.
Because he thought his wife had finally become interested in the parts of his life he had spent years telling her not to worry about.
I almost laughed at the cruelty of it.
He had hidden his world from me, then revealed it to a counterfeit version because she asked in exactly the way he preferred.
The conspiracy did not exploit only technology.
It exploited vanity.
I stared at the screen.
“My father was alive after we buried him.”
---
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