Then she moves to the edge of her chair and puts her hands on my knee. “You have to believe me, Olive. You were the only thing I wanted and what happened to you wasn’t up to me.”

I don’t know how to process this. My fingers go numb and my stomach starts to do somersaults.

“What do you mean?” I manage to ask.

“Your father and I were deeply in love,” she says, biting her lower lip as if thinking about him still gives her pain to this very day. “My parents didn’t approve. His mother didn’t either. We were rich. He was poor. According to my father, he didn’t belong in our prep school even though he was probably the smartest kid there.”

I nod.

“His name was Danny Lebold.”

From the folder, I knew his name but not anything else about him except that she took his name at one point.

Wait, a second.

She used past tense.

I look up at her trying not to let my mind go there.

“Danny died in a car accident,” she says slowly. “The night that we were supposed to run away together. I waited for him and he never showed up. I later learned that his car got pushed out into traffic by another car and someone going sixty miles an hour ran into his driver’s door, killing him instantly.”

I put my hand over my mouth and shake my head.

“Everyone said it was an accident but I didn’t believe it. Not then, not now.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think my father organized the whole thing. I don’t have any proof but he would do anything to stop us.”

“You really think he did that?” I ask, trying to figure out if she actually just told me that my grandfather put a hit out on my father.

“I had my doubts before but after I ran away to California by myself to keep you safe, they found me. I started having contractions and I checked into a hospital. They had their investigative team all around the country working on it and they found me.”

She stops talking for a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. I want to urge her to keep talking but I give her some time.

“The labor wasn’t going well. It was taking forever and at some point my blood pressure started to drop and they wheeled me into a room for an emergency c-section.”

I nod.

“Unlike a planned one, for an emergency c-section, they knock you out completely,” she adds.

I nod again.

She looks up at me with tears in her eyes. She doesn’t wipe them away this time. Instead, she just stares at me and touches my cheek with her warm palm.

“When I woke up, they told me you had died,” she says.

Cold shivers run down my spine.

“What do you mean?”