Chapter 7 - Brooke’s Perfect FamilyBrooke asked to speak with Eleanor without Mark present.
The request came through her attorney.
Eleanor refused a private meeting but agreed to watch through a secure video link while Detective Reed questioned her.
Brooke sat inside an interview room wearing a gray detention uniform. Without the cream dress and courtroom makeup, she appeared younger and more frightened.
“I didn’t know about Eleanor’s mother,” she said.
Reed placed the recorded call with Dr. Crane on the table.
“You heard Mark discuss Marianne.”
“I thought she was alive.”
“You researched the trust.”
“Mark told me it was marital property.”
“It belonged to April.”
Brooke looked away.
Her pregnancy had become the center of her defense. She repeatedly claimed stress endangered the baby and requested home monitoring rather than detention.
Eleanor felt no pleasure watching her fear.
She also refused to let pregnancy erase accountability.
Brooke described meeting Richard Hayes through her father’s former company. Richard approached her after Mark’s construction business defaulted on a private loan.
He knew about the affair before it began.
“He told me Mark felt invisible beside Eleanor,” Brooke said. “He said all I had to do was remind him what respect looked like.”
Richard had studied Mark’s resentment.
Eleanor earned more, managed the household finances, and refused to invest her family trust in his failing business.
Mark interpreted her caution as humiliation.
Brooke offered admiration.
Then Richard offered money.
The affair became an operation.
“Did Mark ever love her?” Reed asked.
Brooke’s face hardened.
“He loved being needed.”
That answer sounded true.
Richard promised Brooke a home, financial security, and a seat on Hayes Biomedical’s board after custody transferred.
Her unborn child would become April’s closest sibling and eventual trust successor if anything happened to the girl.
Reed paused.
“What would need to happen to April?”
Brooke’s hands tightened.
“I never agreed to hurt her.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Richard’s draft trust amendment named Brooke’s child as contingent beneficiary if April died before twenty-one without descendants.
The unborn baby was not merely part of a stable-family performance.
Richard intended to place the two children inside the same inheritance chain.
Brooke claimed she discovered that clause only after becoming pregnant.
She wanted to leave.
Mark refused.
He recorded conversations and threatened to portray her as the mastermind.
“Then why tell him to add more medication?” Reed asked.
Brooke began crying.
“Because Eleanor was supposed to sleep through the morning. Mark said if she woke before the evaluator arrived, she might seem normal.”
“You knew you were drugging her.”
“Yes.”
The word arrived without defense.
Brooke revealed that Jenna supplied courthouse schedules and evidence passwords. She also arranged for Judge Parker to receive the case through emergency rotation.
“Was the judge involved?”
“I don’t know. Jenna said the right judge would follow the evidence.”
Judge Parker’s record showed no connection to Richard.
But the selection process had been manipulated so Mark could predict timing.
The plan required a fast hearing before toxicology could clear Eleanor’s system.
April disrupted it.
Brooke gave Reed a storage-unit number used by Mark and Richard.
The unit contained duplicate tablets, forged school records, prescription bottles, and photographs of April taken from a distance.
One wall displayed a timeline of Eleanor’s symptoms.
Another displayed Marianne’s.
The two women’s breakdowns had been designed almost identically.
At the center was a photograph of Brooke’s ultrasound.
Beneath it, Richard had written:
SECOND CHILD—CONTROL PHASE.
Brooke stared when investigators showed her.
“He called my baby that?”
Richard had reduced every child to a role.
April was the heir.
Brooke’s baby was the control phase.
Inside a locked cabinet, detectives found a medical consent form authorizing fetal genetic collection after birth.
The recipient laboratory belonged to Hayes Biomedical.
Richard planned to experiment on Brooke’s child just as the company had experimented on Marianne.
Brooke’s cooperation became urgent.
Before Reed could return to question her, she was found unconscious inside the interview-room bathroom.
A guard discovered an empty bottle of prenatal vitamins beside her.
The tablets had been replaced with sedatives.
Someone inside detention had reached her.
Brooke survived.
When she woke, she whispered one sentence.
“Jenna isn’t running from Richard.”
“What is she doing?” Reed asked.
Brooke looked toward the locked door.
May you like
“She’s bringing him April.”
👉 Brooke revealed that Richard intended to control both children through the trust, while Jenna’s disappearance appeared to be part of a plan to deliver April directly to him.
