…abandon me, did you?”
The air in the clinic seemed to evaporate. I stared at the crumpled, faded photo in her shaking hands. It was the only picture ever taken of me holding her in the hospital—a photo my mother-in-law, Eleanor, swore she had thrown into the fireplace.
The girl’s hands were ice-cold, and her clothes, though undeniably expensive, were stained and torn. This was a stark contrast to the pristine, gilded cage she was supposed to be living in.
“She told me you traded me for a payout,” my daughter, Lily, choked out, her voice barely above a whisper. “But I broke into her office safe. I found the letters you sent, the ones she returned unopened. I found the cease-and-desist orders she filed against your private investigators.”
I pulled her into a private consultation room, locking the door behind us. I grabbed a heated blanket from the supply closet and wrapped it around her shoulders, my hands hovering over her as if she were a mirage that might vanish if I blinked. For fifteen years, I had agonized over the thought of a pampered, brainwashed heiress who hated my name. I never imagined a runaway desperate for the truth.
“Eleanor is looking for me,” Lily whispered, panic finally breaking through her brave facade. “She has her private security sweeping the city. If she finds me, she’ll lock me away at that boarding school in Switzerland. You don’t know her—you don’t know what she can do.”
“I know exactly what she can do,” I said, kneeling in front of her so we were eye to eye. The birthmark on her cheek mirrored mine perfectly. “But she doesn’t know what I can do anymore.”
I pulled out my phone, but I didn’t dial the police. I dialed the ruthless family law attorney I’d kept on a hefty retainer for the last decade—the one I had hired using the successful business I built from the ground up after Eleanor tried to crush my family into dust. I had spent fifteen years preparing for a war I thought I’d never get to fight.
“She’s not taking you anywhere,” I said, pulling my daughter into my arms for the first time since she was hours old. I buried my face in her hair, letting the tears I’d held back for a decade and a half finally fall. “I was nineteen, broke, and terrified back then. But I’m thirty-four now, and your grandmother is about to find out what happens when you corner a mother.”
