Chapter 5 - BABY GRANT
Miles Trent did not answer Sylvester’s calls. His assistant claimed he was traveling, though vehicle records placed his car at his Manhattan residence. Rebecca stopped treating him as family counsel and hired separate litigation attorneys before requesting preservation of his records connected to Julia’s estate, the Arden Medical Center and the twins’ birth.
The first major reveal arrived from money rather than medicine.
Julia’s archived financial files contained monthly payments from a small holding company called Grant Family Services. The company received funds from the Julia Mercer Trust, then sent nearly identical amounts to a pediatric support organization in Connecticut. The payments began eight years earlier—three days after the twins were born.
Sylvester had never approved them.
Rebecca initially thought someone was siphoning money from Julia’s trust. Then she found the internal coding.
BENEFICIARY SUPPORT — BABY GRANT.
The date of birth matched Evan’s.
For almost eight years, someone had been using Julia’s own trust to support another child born the same night as Evan.
The recipient organization, Brookfield Family Residence, had closed three years earlier. Its records had been transferred to a nonprofit archive. Rebecca obtained enough information to confirm that “Baby Grant” entered emergency foster placement at six days old after being delivered anonymously through an attorney-managed private-placement program.
The attorney was Miles Trent.
Sylvester read the intake summary in silence. The child was male, premature, approximately the same gestational age as Evan, and carried no normal hospital discharge paperwork. Instead, a lawyer certified that the mother had relinquished the child confidentially and that medical records would follow.
They never did.
The baby was placed with a licensed foster caregiver named Grace Reed.
Mason closed his eyes when Rebecca read the name.
Sylvester turned toward him.
“You knew she took the child.”
“No.”
For once the answer came instantly.
Mason had believed Grace’s connection ended at the hospital. Her letters never said she later became the baby’s foster caregiver. Rebecca examined the timeline and understood why. Grace had been suspended from Arden but still held an active nursing license. Someone inside the private-placement system apparently selected her because the premature infant needed medical supervision.
Or because she already knew too much.
Grace kept the boy for seventeen months.
Then the record changed. Baby Grant was transferred into a private adoption under a sealed name. The final page showed no destination because Miles requested judicial confidentiality citing threats to a high-profile family.
Sylvester now had his first major answer.
His second son had not died.
He had left the hospital alive, entered a private foster placement and remained alive for at least seventeen months.
But that answer opened something worse.
If Grace was telling Julia the truth five years ago, why had she never told Julia she herself once cared for the child?
Mason found the answer in the final envelope of his sister’s box. It contained a letter he had never opened because Grace marked it FOR LATER — ONLY IF STALLONE KNOWS. In the letter, Grace explained that she learned the infant’s identity only after he had already been transferred away. Miles had given her a temporary foster child under the Grant alias. Months later she recognized a distinctive neonatal ankle-band number while organizing her copied hospital notes.
By then the adoption was sealed.
She tried to locate the child.
Someone threatened her.
The letter ended with a warning.
Miles knows who the child became.
Sylvester folded the paper slowly.
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The question was no longer whether his second son survived.
It was why Miles Trent spent eight years making sure the father never learned where he was.
