Chapter 7 - VICTORIA REED
Victoria Reed lived in Rhinebeck, two hours north of Manhattan, in a house overlooking the Hudson. She opened the door before we knocked, as though she had watched us arrive, and the first thing she said to Daniel was, “Your mother finally lost control of her own lie.”
Daniel stared at her.
I asked what lie.
Victoria made coffee before answering, which irritated me until I realized she was deciding how much attorney-client privilege still bound her regarding Daniel’s late father. She finally said Margaret had not invented the obsession with biological succession.
Daniel’s father, Richard, had.
The Bennett family’s controlling shares had been structured decades earlier around direct descendants. Richard spent his final years terrified that Daniel and I might never have children and that control would eventually pass to his brother’s branch.
Richard asked Victoria to research whether embryos could be preserved inside a private reproductive trust.
“Reproductive trust?” I asked.
“Not ownership of children. Control of storage fees, disposition instructions, legal coordination. It was experimental and, frankly, grotesque.”
Victoria refused to create it.
Margaret found other lawyers.
Then Victoria disclosed something larger.
Before Richard died, he changed his estate plan.
The biological-descendant clause no longer controlled the voting shares.
Daniel looked stunned. “What?”
Richard had become uncomfortable with the pressure the clause placed on us after learning about my miscarriages. Six months before his death, he amended the trust so Daniel’s voting shares would pass according to his own estate plan whether or not he had biological children.
Margaret knew.
She was executor.
The motive she gave us in Chapter 5 had been obsolete for years.
That was the expansion we needed before the midpoint.
“If she didn’t need an heir for the company,” I asked, “why did she do this?”
Victoria looked at Daniel.
“Because by then it wasn’t about the shares.”
Richard’s original obsession had become Margaret’s personal ideology. She believed the Bennett line itself needed continuation, independent of corporate necessity. Richard eventually changed his mind.
Margaret did not.
Victoria left family practice after discovering Margaret had concealed the estate amendment from several relatives because she feared losing influence over Daniel’s reproductive decisions.
“What about B-19?” Daniel asked.
Victoria’s expression tightened.
Seven months earlier, somebody contacted her claiming Margaret wanted help correcting an unauthorized embryo transfer. Victoria was paid a consulting fee to review whether a gestational-carrier agreement could be unwound after transfer but before pregnancy confirmation.
“Who contacted you?”
“Vanessa.”
We both turned toward each other.
Vanessa had said she knew nothing about B-19.
Victoria showed us the email.
Vanessa asked whether an embryo could be retrieved from a carrier if it had been transferred without one genetic parent’s consent. She never identified the patient, but the payment arrived from Bennett Family Holdings.
“Did she tell you the transfer failed?”
“Later.”
“Why?”
“She sounded relieved.”
That changed Vanessa’s role again.
Maybe she had discovered someone moved B-19 and tried to stop it.
Or maybe she had helped arrange it and panicked afterward.
Victoria gave us the final clue.
The gestational carrier at Evergreen had not been anonymous to whoever arranged the transfer. The legal draft referenced her by initials.
M.B.
Daniel looked at the page.
I did not know the initials.
He did.
“Megan Blake.”
“Who is she?” I asked.
His face changed.
“My cousin Stephen’s wife.”
Stephen belonged to the family branch that would have inherited control under Richard’s old trust.
The obsolete succession clause had just reentered the story from the opposite side.
May you like
If Megan had carried our embryo successfully, Stephen’s household would have possessed a biological Bennett child genetically belonging to Daniel and me.
Someone had been moving embryos between rival branches of the same family.
