Unwanted Blood (Harper) novel Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Adrian’s POV

I didn’t leave the kitchenette right away.

I sat in the chair Harper had vacated, the overhead light casting a warm yellow circle across the table, and lifted my left arm. The gauze was clean. Even. The tape edges pressed flat against my skin. And at the end of the wrap, a small, neat knot.

I’d read it in the background report Colton’s team had compiled on her. Harper Wilson spent her days at the Gadigal Center, teaching arts and crafts to kids from low-income families. Kids who scraped their knees on concrete, who burned their fingers on hot glue guns, who fell off chairs and bit their tongues and came to her crying.

She was the one who cleaned them up.

Now, sitting alone in a dim kitchenette with her handiwork on my arm, I understood what it

meant.

Among everyone in my life, Harper was the only one who’d frowned when she saw I was bleeding.

Something shifted in my chest. Small. Uncomfortable. Like a gear catching on a tooth it wasn’t designed for.

I pressed it down. Hard.

I stood, adjusted my jacket, and walked out of the kitchenette without looking back.

I didn’t go to my room. I went to the study.

Inside the top drawer, beneath a stack of corporate correspondence and a sealed letter from our legal counsel, was an envelope. Old. Yellowed at the edges.

I pulled it out and set it on the desk.

Inside were my father’s medical records. From the private psychiatric clinic on the north shore. The one he’d been admitted to three months after Harper’s mother died in the delivery room. The diagnosis: acute stress disorder. The medication list: benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, sleep aids. The kind of cocktail you give someone whose mind is eating itself alive.

0.00%

11:37

Chapter 58

And one handwritten note from the attending physician, tucked into the back of the file, in small, careful script

“Patient acknowledges involvement in a medical incident but refuses to provide specifics When pressed, becomes agitated. Repeated phrase: ‘I didn’t mean for her to die.’ No further detail forthcoming.”

I stared at that line for a long time.

I didn’t mean for her to die.

Which meant he had done something. Something that crossed a line he hadn’t intended to cross.

I folded the records back into the envelope. I put the envelope in my jacket pocket.

And I went to bed.

Breakfast the next morning was the same as every morning. The dining room, the long table, the quiet clink of silverware against porcelain. The staff moved in and out like ghosts.

Harper sat in her usual chair, her posture straight, her expression unreadable, her eyes fixed on her plate like she was reading something written in the eggs.

I set the envelope on the table between us.

She looked up.

“You’ve been wondering who’s in that building,” I said.

Her eyes moved from the envelope to my face. She didn’t touch it.

I pushed it closer. “Part of my father’s medical records from the clinic. After your mother died.”

“The attending doctor wrote a note,” I continued. “It says my father admitted involvement in a medical incident. He refused to say which one. But the timeline matches.”

She reached out. Her fingers touched the edge of the envelope.

“Why are you giving me this?” she asked.

I leaned back in my chair. The morning light caught the rim of my coffee cup, turning the liquid inside the colour of dark amber. “Maybe because you bandaged my arm last night.”

“So you’re repaying a favour?” she said. Her voice was confused. “I didn’t think the heir of Westbrook compromised himself over a bit of gauze.”

35.56%

11.37

Chapter 58

I shook my head.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify