Chapter 53 The Nanny’s Name
In the music room, Silas took a few minutes to go through the photographs.
Mia sat on the piano bench watching him, her hands wrapped around a drink she’d brought from the hall. He stood at the piano with her phone propped against the music stand, scrolling slowly, pausing, scrolling again. His expression didn’t change much, but she’d learned to read the small things, the slight tension around his jaw when something landed, the way his breathing went carefully even when he was actually thinking hard.
When he got to the financial records section, he stopped scrolling entirely.
“Jane Smith,” he read aloud.
“I know,” Mia said.
He kept looking at the screen. “This is the name on every tuition payment. Not the Vance Group. Not Elara’s father. A private individual named Jane Smith.”
“Yes.”
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he picked up her phone and zoomed in on the account details, the routing numbers, the payment dates going back three years. “Someone has been paying Elara’s tuition privately, under a false name, consistently, for her entire time at St. Augustine’s.”
“It’s not a false name, necessarily,” Mia said. “It could be her real name. Just not one that gets used.”
Silas set the phone down and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Mia hesitated. “I mean that ‘Jane Smith’ is the kind of name someone uses when they want to be invisible. Not a fake name. A buried one.” She turned her cup in her hands. “Who at the Vance family home would need to be invisible?”
She watched him work through it. It took about four seconds, and then something shifted in his face. Not surprise, exactly. More like a piece of a puzzle clicking into place that changed the shape of everything around it.
“The nanny,” he said quietly.
Mia nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it since earlier. The company is EdVance. Elara’s last name is Vance. But if she’s not a legitimate heir, if she’s the daughter of someone on staff….”
“Then her tuition being paid by the nanny makes sense.” Silas was very still. “She’s not paying it out of family wealth. She’s being paid for by her mother. Who is hiding that connection under the most generic name possible, so no one looks twice at the transaction.”
“Which means Elara’s place at this school, her entire life here, is built on money that isn’t Vance money at all.” Mia let that sit for a second. “Her power, her connections, her ‘family background’ that everyone defers to. It’s performance all the way down.”
Silas turned away from the piano and walked a few steps toward the window, the old grimy glass that let in thin grey light. He stood there with his back to her.
“She’s been pretending to be someone she’s not,” he said. “The whole time.”
“The same way she pretended to be Ethan’s friend,” Mia said. “The same way she pretends to care about everyone she’s using.”
Silas turned back around. His face had that focused, cold look she knew as him being genuinely angry but keeping it contained. “If we can prove the Jane Smith account belongs to a woman who was employed as a nanny by the Vance family, then Elara’s entire identity at this school is fraudulent. The donations, the family name she’s been leveraging, all of it.”
“It’s not the murder,” Mia said carefully. “On its own, it doesn’t convict her of anything.”
“No. But it’s leverage.” He picked up her phone again, looked at the account number. “And it tells us who she really is underneath the persona. Where the desperation comes from.”
Mia thought about all she’d pieced together over months. The illegitimate daughter, the nanny’s child, raised in a household that probably tolerated her presence but never accepted her. Building herself into something formidable because it was the only way to survive. Needing Ethan because he was the one thing she couldn’t acquire through performance alone, the one thing that wouldn’t be impressed by her.
She wondered sometimes, in the quieter moments, if Elara had ever been genuinely capable of love, or if it had always just been a need to possess.
“I’m going to look into the Vance household employment records,” Silas said. “It’ll take a few days. There are property registrations, household staff filings if the family was registered as an employer. If there’s a Jane Smith anywhere in those records…”
His phone buzzed on the piano. He glanced at it, and something changed in his expression. Brief, but she caught it.
“What?” Mia asked.
He showed her the screen. A text from Elara, sent eleven minutes ago: Where did you disappear to?
Mia looked up at him. Neither of them said anything.
He typed back: Sorry. Got a call from home, had to step outside. I’m coming in now.
Three dots appeared immediately. Then: Okay. Just missed you.
Silas looked at the message for a moment, his jaw tightening almost imperceptibly. “She’s been looking for me.”
“How long were we in here?” Mia asked.
He checked the time. “Twenty-three minutes.”
“That’s long enough for her to notice,” Mia said quietly. “Long enough for her to wonder.”
Silas’s thumb hovered over the screen, as if he was considering typing something else, then thought better of it. “We need to be more careful. If she suspects I’m avoiding her, or that I know something…”
“She’ll start watching you more closely,” Mia finished. “The way she watches everyone who gets too close to the truth.”
Outside the music room, they could hear the distant thump of bass from the prom, the occasional burst of laughter echoing down the hallway.
“I’ll start with property records tomorrow,” Silas said. “Cross-reference any Jane Smith who appears in employment documentation for the Vance household between eighteen and twenty-five years ago.”
“That’s when Elara would have been born,” Mia said.
“Exactly.” He handed her back the phone. “If her mother was employed as a nanny, there would be a paper trail. The Vances wouldn’t have risked employing someone off the books, not with their reputation.”
Another buzz from his phone. Both of them looked at it.
Are you still outside? It’s freezing out there.
Silas exhaled slowly. “I should go back.”
“Yeah,” Mia said. She stood up from the piano bench, smoothing down her dress. “Wait a few minutes after I leave. We shouldn’t walk back together.”
He nodded. They knew who Elara really was now. Not just a killer, but a fraud. Someone who’d built an entire existence on lies.
“Silas,” Mia said quietly. “Be careful with her tonight. She’s already suspicious.”
“I know.” His voice was calm, but she could see the tension in his shoulders. “I’ll handle it.”
Mia headed for the door, glancing back at him one more time. He was standing at the piano still, backlit by the grey window light, looking at his phone screen with an expression she couldn’t quite read.
Then she slipped out into the hallway, leaving him alone.