Before she left, she handed over a separate sealed envelope.

“This isn’t about the fraud,” she said quietly.

“But it explains why Mark was so obsessed with keeping Noah around.”

Inside were a certified DNA test and old custody filings.

Six-year-old Noah wasn’t Mark’s biological child, and he wasn’t Chloe’s.

He was the son of Mark’s late older brother and sister-in-law, who had both died in a car accident six years earlier.