How Victor Found Him
Chapter 06 - How Victor Found Him
Sarah's continued investigation uncovered the answer within the week, a private investigator's invoice buried in Victor's company financial records, dated eleven months earlier, payment made to a firm specializing in locating missing family members.
"Victor hired someone to find you specifically, nearly a year ago," Sarah told Nathan, presenting the invoice. "Which means this wasn't an accident of employment. He found you first, and then arranged for you to be hired at his own company, likely so he could monitor you closely while he decided what to do."
Nathan felt a fresh wave of cold horror at that revelation, understanding that his entire eight months of employment, every shift, every interaction with Victor, had apparently been part of a deliberate, calculated surveillance rather than the ordinary coincidence he'd always assumed.
"Why not just leave me alone," Nathan asked. "If he never told our father's estate attorney I existed, why not simply let the will's provision remain irrelevant, since nobody officially knew there was a second heir."
"I suspect he couldn't be certain nobody else knew," Sarah said. "Harold Reeves's original attorney, the one who arranged your adoption, would have known. If that attorney was still alive, or had left any record behind, Victor faced a permanent, ongoing risk that the truth might surface eventually, regardless of what he did."
"So he decided to eliminate the risk directly," Nathan said, the specific horror of that calculation settling fully into place.
"That appears to be exactly what happened," Sarah confirmed. "I've requested records from the original adoption attorney's firm as well, to understand exactly what Victor might have been trying to prevent from ever coming to light."
The attorney, it turned out, had passed away eight years earlier, though his firm's successor located the original adoption file in archived storage, confirming precisely what Nathan and Sarah had already begun to suspect.
The file included a sealed letter from Harold Reeves himself, written the same month as the adoption, explaining his reasoning in his own words, a document Sarah read aloud to Nathan in her office once it finally arrived.
*I am arranging for my second son to be raised outside this family,* the letter read, *not because I don't love him equally, but because his mother's family has threatened considerable legal complications regarding the circumstances of his conception, complications I am not prepared to litigate publicly. I intend to correct this decision eventually, once circumstances allow. I have built protection into my will ensuring that if he is ever identified as my firstborn son, his rightful inheritance remains intact regardless of how long this separation lasts.*
Nathan sat with his father's words, decades old, finally reaching him through a chain of documents nobody had ever expected would need to be assembled this way.
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"He always intended to make this right eventually," Nathan said quietly. "He just never got the chance."
"He built the protection into the will specifically because he anticipated exactly this kind of complication," Sarah said. "I think, in a strange way, your father understood his other son well enough to worry about precisely what's now happened."
