Chapter 3 - Whispers No One Wanted to Hear
News of the engagement spread through Chicago's business circles like wildfire through dry grass.
Some reacted with polite, careful congratulations. Most reacted with barely concealed alarm.
Grace Whitfield showed up at Veronica's mansion the following evening, uninvited, her face tight with worry. "Please tell me you're at least getting a prenup," she said before she'd even taken off her coat.
"Alex already said he'd sign whatever I wanted," Veronica replied, pouring two glasses of wine. "He said the money means nothing to him. He said it would actually be a relief, honestly — one less thing for people to whisper about."
"And you believed him."
"I believe the man who held my hand for six hours in a hospital waiting room when my hip gave out last spring, Grace. I believe the man who has never once asked me for anything — not a car, not a loan, not a single dollar. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many men in this city would have asked for a Porsche by now?"
Grace didn't have an answer for that, because it was true. Alex had, with remarkable discipline, refused every gift Veronica tried to give him. A watch. A car. Even a simple credit card for emergencies. Each time, he'd waved it away with a laugh — "I don't want people thinking that's why I'm here" — and each refusal had only deepened Veronica's trust in him.
What Grace didn't know — what no one knew — was that this restraint had been the most calculated part of Alex's plan from the very beginning. A man who takes nothing, he had learned long ago from watching other men fail at exactly this game, is a man who is never suspected of wanting everything.
Daniel Voss made one final attempt.
He requested a private meeting in Veronica's office, no assistants present, the door locked. He placed a slim folder on her desk.
"This is everything my investigator found," he said. "Alex Turner is not his birth name. He was born Aleksandr Turnov, changed his name legally eight years ago. Before that, he spent two years engaged to a widow in Palm Beach — sixty-one years old, worth approximately eleven million dollars. The engagement ended abruptly when she suffered what her family described as a sudden, unexplained fall down a staircase. She survived, but with permanent injuries, and broke off the engagement immediately afterward, refusing to press charges or discuss what happened. Before her, there was another woman in Dallas. Seventy-three. She passed away from what was ruled a heart attack, six weeks before their planned wedding. He inherited nothing, because they were not yet married — but he was named in her will regardless, for an amount her family successfully contested in court."
Veronica stared at the folder, her hands unexpectedly steady even as something inside her chest twisted violently. "You're telling me you think Alex is a murderer."
"I'm telling you there is a pattern, Veronica, and patterns exist for a reason. I am asking you — begging you — to postpone the wedding. Just long enough to look into this properly."
For a long, silent moment, Veronica said nothing at all. She thought of the string lights over the lake. She thought of soup delivered in silence on the anniversary of Richard's death. She thought of a man who had refused every gift she'd ever offered him.
Then she thought of something else — something she would later understand had been the single most dangerous thought of her life.
Everyone has a past, she told herself. Everyone has been hurt, has hurt others, has done things they regret. I, too, have made ruthless decisions in boardrooms that cost people their jobs, their savings, their futures. Am I a monster for that? Should I be judged only by my worst moments?
"Thank you for your concern, Daniel," she said finally, closing the folder without opening it further. "But I've made my decision. I love him. And I refuse to let fear rule the rest of my life the way it's ruled the years since Richard died."
Daniel left her office that afternoon with the distinct, sinking feeling that he had just failed to save his oldest friend's life, and that no argument he could ever make would be enough to change her mind.
He was, as it would turn out, almost entirely correct.
The wedding planning proceeded at a breathtaking pace. Alex suggested, with apparent romantic spontaneity, an unconventional ceremony — a small, intimate wedding at Veronica's countryside estate, followed by a private helicopter flight to Hail Island, the small private island off the coast of Maine that Veronica had purchased years ago and rarely visited, where they would sign the final marriage documents in seclusion, "away from all the noise and the cameras," as he put it.
"Just the two of us," he told her, "and the sky."
Veronica, moved nearly to tears by the romance of it, agreed immediately.
She did not know that Alex had spent the previous three weeks quietly researching maritime and international law, searching specifically for jurisdictions where a death occurring over open water, far from any coastline, might present significant complications for any future investigation. She did not know he had spoken, under an assumed name, with two separate attorneys about inheritance law as it applied to a spouse who died within hours of a marriage being legally finalized. She did not know that the helicopter pilot he had personally selected — a man named Curtis Boyle — had a gambling debt so severe that he had, three days earlier, accepted an envelope of cash in exchange for a promise to "not ask questions" about whatever happened during the return flight.
All Veronica knew, as she stood in her closet the night before her wedding, holding up the ivory lace gown she would wear the next day, was that for the first time since Richard died, she felt completely, wonderfully happy.
May you like
She had no idea that happiness had an expiration date scheduled for the following afternoon, somewhere above the cold gray waters of the Atlantic.
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