Betrayed Broken Husband Becomes a Billionaire Daddy

18: Edwin Lincoln

Chloe showed up at Lucien Legion's apartment two nights later, unannounced, her eyes swollen from crying the whole drive over. He took one look at her face and pulled her inside without a single question, sitting her down at the kitchen table before he asked anything at all.

"What happened?" He crouched in front of her chair, scanning her face, her arms, checking for anything visible the way sixteen years of parenting had trained him to check first and ask questions second.

"Mom slapped me." She said it flatly, like saying it fast might make it hurt less. "I asked her if there was another man. If that's why she was scared of your test."

Lucien Legion went very still, his jaw tightening. "She hit you?"

"It doesn't matter right now." Chloe pulled her phone out of her pocket, her hands shaking slightly as she opened the photo she'd taken of the screen before Stacy walked back in. "This matters more."

She turned the phone toward him. Lucien Legion took it carefully, reading the screen twice before he said anything.

"Edwin Lincoln." He said the name slowly, testing the shape of it. "Who is that?"

"A director." Chloe wiped at her face with the back of her hand. "Mom's worked with him a bunch of times over the years. I always just thought he was, like, a work friend. But look at the message, Dad. Look what it says."

Lucien Legion read it again. If the baby comes, Lucien must believe it is his. The words sat on the screen like something radioactive, and he felt the floor of his understanding shift under him in a way even the mismatched intake numbers hadn't managed to do.

"Where did you find this?" His voice came out low, careful, though everything in him wanted to shout the question.

"Her phone. Recently Deleted folder." Chloe's voice cracked. "I know I shouldn't have looked. I know that. But after she hit me I just... I needed to know if there was a reason."

"You did the right thing." Lucien Legion set the phone down gently on the table, though his hand wasn't quite steady doing it. "I need you to send this to me. The screenshot. Can you do that?"

Chloe nodded, already typing, and a moment later his own phone buzzed with the image.

"Dad." She looked up at him, fear plain on her face now that the adrenaline of finding it had worn off. "What does this mean? Is he... is Edwin Lincoln my real father?"

"I don't know yet." He kept his voice steady for her sake, even though his mind was already racing three steps ahead. "But I intend to find out. I promise you that."

He kept her close the rest of the evening, made her dinner she barely touched, and only after she'd fallen asleep in the guest room did he sit down at his laptop with her screenshot open beside the search bar, his hands hovering over the keyboard for a long moment before he started typing.

Edwin Lincoln was not a hard man to find information about. Three decades in the film industry, a string of prestige dramas, two directing nominations at award shows Lucien Legion vaguely remembered watching with Stacy years ago, sitting on the couch together, her hand in his, cheering when one of Edwin's films won something neither of them particularly cared about beyond the fact that she knew people involved.

He hadn't thought anything of it at the time. Stacy knew everyone in that world. That was the job.

He started pulling up old articles, old event photographs, anything with both their names attached, and the deeper he went the more a pattern started emerging that made his stomach turn slowly over.

It wasn't one or two projects. Edwin Lincoln had directed Stacy in four different films across nearly a decade, back to back, an unusually tight working relationship for two people who supposedly saw each other only on set. Interviews from years back had them finishing each other's sentences, laughing at private jokes the interviewer clearly wasn't in on. One entertainment piece from seventeen years ago, buried on page four of a search result, referred to them as, quote, the industry's favorite off screen chemistry, the kind fans wished would become something real.

Lucien Legion sat back from the screen, rubbing his eyes. Seventeen years ago put it right in the window. Right before Chloe was born.

He kept digging, deeper into old photo archives from entertainment outlets, searching specifically for dates instead of names now, narrowing in on the months surrounding Chloe's conception, the timeline burned into his memory from every custody conversation and lawyer meeting he'd sat through over the last several weeks.

He found it a little after midnight, a photograph from a small industry gathering, grainy but clear enough. Stacy in a green dress he actually remembered, because he'd been the one to zip it up for her that night before she left for the event alone, telling him it was just a work thing, nothing he'd enjoy.

Standing beside her in the photograph, close enough that his hand rested lightly at the small of her back in a way that no professional colleague's hand belonged, was Edwin Lincoln.

The timestamp on the article placed it three weeks before the date Lucien Legion's own memory, and years of anniversaries, told him Chloe had been conceived.

He stared at the photograph for a long time, the coldness spreading slow and thick through his chest. It wasn't proof of anything by itself. A hand at someone's back wasn't an affair. A tight working relationship wasn't a betrayal. He knew that, the same careful part of his mind that had built chain of custody forms and photographed evidence bags telling him not to convict anyone based on one grainy photograph.

But it was enough to make the deleted message read differently. Enough to make sixteen years of small, unexamined details rearrange themselves into a shape he didn't want to look at directly.

He picked up his phone and called Marcus, an old friend from medical school who'd left clinical practice years ago to run a small private investigation firm, the kind of quiet, discreet operation wealthy clients used when they needed answers lawyers couldn't officially ask for.

Marcus picked up on the second ring, his voice thick with sleep. "Lucien. It's past midnight. This better be a medical emergency."

"It's not medical." Lucien Legion kept his voice low, pacing his kitchen now, unable to sit still. "I need a favor. Off the books, if you can manage it."

"You sound different." Marcus's voice sharpened, waking up fast. "What's going on?"

"I need everything you can find on a man named Edwin Lincoln." Lucien Legion spelled the name out slowly. "Specifically anything from about sixteen, seventeen years ago. Travel records if you can get them. Public appearances. Anywhere he was during a specific window of time."

"This about Stacy?" Marcus asked it carefully, already guessing more than Lucien Legion had said out loud.

"It's about Chloe." Lucien Legion's voice caught slightly on her name. "I think there's a chance everything I thought I knew about her birth isn't what actually happened."

A long pause on the line. "Give me the exact dates. I'll see what I can pull together."

Lucien Legion gave him the window, the same dates burned into his memory from every hospital anniversary card he'd ever signed, every birthday party, every quiet moment standing in a doorway watching his daughter sleep as a newborn and thinking his whole life had just permanently changed for the better.

Marcus called back two days later, his voice carrying none of its usual easy humor.

"I found something." No preamble this time. "It took some digging, but a travel manifest from a private charter service has a passenger matching Edwin Lincoln's name flying into the city the same week Chloe was born. I cross referenced it against a hotel booking three blocks from the hospital where your daughter was delivered. Checked in the day before her birth, checked out four days after."

Lucien Legion sat down hard on the edge of his couch, the phone pressed tight against his ear, the room tilting slightly around him even though nothing in it had actually moved.

"Three blocks." He repeated it numbly. "From the hospital."

"Three blocks." Marcus's voice softened, the way it used to back in their residency days delivering hard news to families in a hallway neither of them had ever gotten fully comfortable with. "Lucien, I don't know what any of this means yet. Proximity isn't proof. But given everything else you've told me, I didn't think you'd want me sitting on it."

Lucien Legion stared at the far wall of his living room without seeing it, the timeline assembling itself piece by piece in his mind, the photograph, the message, and now this, a man who was supposed to mean nothing standing close enough to breathe the same air as his daughter's first hours of life.

Edwin Lincoln had been there. Not across the country on some film set, not buried in production meetings the way Stacy's stories had always implied when his name came up at all. He had been three blocks away, checked into a hotel timed almost exactly to the day Chloe was born.