Nathan's Face in the Mirror
Chapter 04 - Nathan's Face in the Mirror
Nathan visited his adoptive parents that same weekend, driving two hours to the small house where he'd grown up, needing to ask questions he'd never once felt urgent enough to raise before.
"I need to know everything," he told them, sitting at the same kitchen table where he'd done homework as a child. "About my adoption. Everything you know, even the parts you might have kept from me to protect me."
His mother, Diane, exchanged a long look with his father before answering. "We were told very little, Nathan. A private adoption, arranged through an attorney rather than an agency. We were told your birth mother couldn't care for you, and that the arrangement needed to remain confidential, at the birth family's specific request."
"Confidential how," Nathan asked. "Sealed records confidential, or something more deliberate."
"The attorney handling it was unusually insistent on secrecy," his father, Roger, said. "We assumed, at the time, it was simply a wealthy family wanting to avoid scandal. We never had any specific concern beyond that."
"Do you still have contact information for that attorney," Nathan asked.
Diane retrieved an old file box from the closet, the kind of careful, sentimental archive parents keep without ever expecting their adult children to need it directly, and found a business card, yellowed with age, tucked inside a folder of adoption paperwork.
"Harold Reeves's law office," Nathan read aloud, studying the faded card. "That name feels familiar somehow."
He searched it on his phone, and the first result made his stomach drop entirely.
Harold Reeves, founder of Reeves Construction, deceased three years earlier, survived by his son, Victor Reeves, who had taken over the company and, according to a business profile from several years back, rebranded several of its subsidiaries under the name Cole Development, his mother's maiden name.
"Victor Cole," Nathan said slowly. "Victor Reeves. He changed his operating name."
Diane looked at the search results over his shoulder, her face going pale. "Nathan. That's the same Harold Reeves who arranged your adoption."
Nathan sat frozen, the pieces of an entirely different life rearranging themselves in his mind, faster than he could fully process.
"You think Victor is connected to your birth family," Roger said slowly.
"I think," Nathan said, "that Victor might be my birth family."
He pulled up a photograph from the search results, an old company profile from years earlier, Harold Reeves standing beside a younger, considerably thinner Victor at some groundbreaking ceremony.
May you like
Nathan stared at the photo for a long moment, at Victor's face, at the specific shape of his jaw, his eyes, features he'd genuinely never thought twice about until this exact moment.
Features that looked, disturbingly, exactly like his own.
