Daniel Mercer
Chapter 06 - Daniel Mercer
Daniel Mercer was alive.
Victoria learned this at 1:17 in the morning when Samuel placed a current address on the library table.
Daniel had never become the famous journalist he once imagined. After Victoria disappeared from his life, he pursued the Langford family too aggressively. Editors stopped returning calls. Sources withdrew. One newspaper fired him after a defamation threat.
He moved to Milwaukee, taught investigative writing at a community college, married no one, and kept a box of returned letters for twenty-two years.
Victoria called him before courage changed its mind.
He answered on the fifth ring.
“Hello?”
Her voice failed.
Mara sat across the room, watching a woman who had terrified a ballroom become frightened by one word.
“Daniel.”
Silence stretched.
Then a chair scraped on his end.
“Victoria?”
She closed her eyes.
“I need to ask you about our daughter.”
Daniel’s breath broke.
“Our daughter?”
Mara looked away, suddenly feeling like an intruder in the story of her own birth.
Victoria told him only enough: the locket, the ledger, the living young woman in the room.
Daniel did not cry loudly. He became quiet in the way people do when grief changes direction too fast.
“I came to the hospital,” he said. “Your mother told me you had left for Europe and did not want me near the baby.”
“I was told she died.”
“I wrote to you.”
“I never received anything.”
Daniel laughed once, without humor.
“Of course.”
He drove to Chicago before sunrise.
When he entered the mansion library, Mara stood beside the window, arms crossed protectively. Daniel stopped in the doorway.
He had Mara’s mouth.
She had his habit of tilting her head when suspicious.
No one hugged.
Real reunions are often too complicated for immediate tenderness.
Daniel looked at the locket.
“I bought that from a pawnshop,” he whispered. “Victoria said it looked like something a brave girl would carry.”
Mara swallowed.
“My mother carried it for me.”
Daniel’s eyes filled.
“Which mother?”
The question was not cruel.
It was the first honest one.
May you like
Mara answered softly.
“Both, I think.”
