The Attic

The metal duct smelled of dry rot and dead mice. Claire dragged herself forward by her elbows, the galvanized steel scraping skin from her forearms with every inch. Behind her, the sounds of the wine cellar—the shouting, the confusion—faded into a dull, rhythmic thrumming of the house’s circulation system.

She crawled until the air grew colder. A draft hit her face, carrying the scent of cedar and mothballs.

She reached a vertical shaft. A laundry chute, or perhaps an old service lift, long decommissioned. There were rungs bolted into the brickwork.

Claire didn't look down. She reached up, her fingers closing around the cold iron, and began to climb.

She bypassed the first floor. Too dangerous. The kitchen, the foyer, the study—Arthur’s territory. She bypassed the second floor. Bedrooms. David.

She climbed until the air turned frigid and the brickwork ended in a wooden trapdoor.

She pushed. It was heavy, weighted down by something on the other side. She braced her shoulders against the wood and shoved, gritting her teeth against the pain in her bruised arm.

Something scraped across the floor above. The door gave way.

Claire hauled herself up and rolled onto dusty floorboards, gasping for air.

She was in the attic.

It was a cavernous space that ran the length of the main house, lit only by the moonlight filtering through the dormer windows. The air was freezing, visible in white puffs before her face. It was a graveyard of the Vance dynasty, piled high with the detritus of lives that Arthur had curated and discarded.

Broken chairs. Steamer trunks with peeling labels. A mannequin wearing a dress from the 1950s that looked like a ghost in the periphery of her vision.

Claire stood up, brushing the filth from her clothes. She needed to find a way out. A window that led to a trellis? A fire escape?

She moved through the maze of junk, her footsteps muffled by the thick layer of dust.

Then she stopped.

In the center of the room, distinct from the haphazard piles of furniture, was a row of cardboard boxes. They were stacked neatly, their edges aligned, taped shut with brown packing tape that had yellowed with age.

They looked like the boxes she had seen in the basement, the ones Arthur kept in the File Room. But these were banished to the attic.

Claire knelt by the nearest stack. She wiped the dust from the label written in black marker.

*Donations - 1993.*

1993. The year after the transition. The year Lena Kovac fully became Evelyn Vance.

Claire used the skeleton key to slice through the brittle tape. She folded back the flaps.

A smell of lavender sachets and old cotton wafted out.

Clothes.

She pulled out a sweater. It was soft, oversized. A pastel yellow that Evelyn—the Evelyn Claire knew—would never have worn. Evelyn wore navy, charcoal, and black. Structured suits. Silk blouses.

Claire dug deeper.

There were jeans with elastic panels sewn into the waist. There were oversized t-shirts with empire waists. There was a dress with a floral pattern, the fabric gathered loosely around the midsection to accommodate expansion.

Claire held the dress up in the moonlight.

It was a maternity dress.

She looked at the size. *Petite.*

Evelyn Vance—the real one—had had a hysterectomy in 1991. The medical records in the safe deposit box proved it. She physically could not have been pregnant in 1993.

And Lena Kovac? The story Arthur told the world was that "Evelyn" spent 1993 traveling. Recovering from her nerves. Reconnecting with her art.

She wasn't traveling.

Claire looked at the box again. There were three of them, all marked 1993. All filled with clothes designed to hide a growing belly.

Lena Kovac hadn't just been hired to play a mother to Arthur’s son. She had been brought here to breed.

Claire dropped the dress as if it were burning. She reached for the next item in the box, a folded piece of paper tucked between the layers of fabric. It was a receipt from a private medical courier service.

*Delivery: 10 vials. Human Chorionic Gonadotropin.*

*Recipient: Dr. E. Thorne.*

*Patient: Subject L.*

Claire stared at the paper. Subject L. Lena.

She turned the receipt over. On the back, scribbled in the same jagged handwriting she had seen on the photo in the library, was a list of dates and temperatures. And at the bottom, a single, terrifying question that had never been answered in the family history books.

*November 1993: Where is the baby?*