The next day, I checked myself out of the hospital. When the Uber pulled up to the estate Adrian and I had shared, my key didn’t work. The locks had been changed.
Through the glass sidelight, I saw Celeste. She was wearing my silk robe, sipping espresso. When she saw me holding three infant car seats on the porch, she didn’t open the door. She just held up a piece of paper against the glass—a quitclaim deed showing the house had been transferred to her name. She mouthed, “Go away.”
I didn’t cry. I simply walked back to the car, buckled my sons in, and gave the driver a new address: a private airstrip on the outskirts of the city.
Adrian knew me as Evelyn Vance, a quiet orphan he’d met at a local charity gala. He thought my lack of family history meant I had no one. He didn’t know that “Vance” was a pseudonym I used to escape the suffocating shadow of my real name.
As the private jet touched down, the cabin door opened to reveal my father, Arthur Sterling—the billionaire vanguard of global shipping and real estate—and my mother, Eleanor, a top-tier corporate litigator who had successfully barred three different conglomerates from the stock exchange.
“My darling,” my mother said, rushing forward to scoop up two of the bassinets. Her eyes were fiercely protective. “The audacity of a cockroach is always surprising, isn’t it?”
My father looked at me, his face a mask of calm, terrifying authority. “Adrian Vale bought his way into his current firm using a shell company loan, correct?”
“Yes,” I said, a cold smile finally touching my lips. “And he used my personal signature as the silent guarantor.”
“Excellent,” my father murmured. “Let’s begin.”
The Audit
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