Chapter 1
The hockey stick hit my shoulder before I could pull Lily behind me.
Pain shot down my arm. I dropped to my knees on the kitchen tile and folded myself around my little girl.
“Mommy?”
“I’m here.” My voice barely came out. “Keep your head down.”
Victoria stood over us in a white dress that probably cost more than I earned in a month. She held the stick with both hands.
Three months ago, she had smiled while Nathan introduced her to me.
Now she looked at Lily as if my daughter were something she could erase.
“Please,” I said. “She’s four.”
Victoria’s grip tightened.
“Then you should have kept her away from this house.”
She raised the stick again.
The front door opened.
“Nathan?” Victoria called, her voice suddenly sweet and frightened.
He appeared in the kitchen doorway and stopped.
His eyes went to the stick. Then to my shoulder. Then to Lily, crying beneath me.
Victoria let the stick fall.
“It isn’t what it looks like.”
Nathan crossed the kitchen in three strides.
“Grace, can you stand?”
Before I could answer, Lily lifted her face.
“Daddy?”
He went still.
For four years, I had dreaded that word reaching him this way. I had imagined telling him somewhere quiet, with time to explain why I had disappeared.
Instead, I was on his floor, and his fiancée had just attacked us.
Nathan looked at me.
I nodded through the pain.
“She’s your daughter.”
Victoria backed against the counter.
“You can’t believe her. She brought that child here to get money.”
Lily held out a shaking hand. Nathan crouched, but he waited for her to come to him. She reached for his sleeve.
“Mommy showed me your picture,” she whispered.
Nathan closed his eyes for one second.
Then he took out his phone and called for an ambulance and the police.
Victoria lunged for him. “Nathan, think about your father.”
“My father is dead.”
“That doesn’t mean what he built is safe.”
I knew then she knew far more than I had feared.
Nathan heard it too.
“What did my father build, Victoria?”
She said nothing.
At the hospital, a doctor examined my shoulder. Nothing was broken, but the swelling was severe. Lily refused to leave my side while a nurse checked her for injuries.
Nathan sat across from us, looking at Lily as though blinking might make her disappear.
“I wrote to you,” I told him.
“I never got a letter.”
“I called the office after you left for London.”
“They told me you’d quit.”
“I was told you wanted me gone.”
He stared at me.
I could see the old wound opening in him. Five years earlier, I had worked at one of his company’s properties while he was helping manage it. For a brief, foolish stretch of my life, I had believed we might build a future together.
Then his father summoned me.
He knew I was pregnant. I had told no one but Nathan’s father and my doctor. Nathan was away, and I wanted to tell him myself when he returned.
His father showed me the calls I had made to the office. He knew where my mother lived and how little money she had. He said Nathan would never receive my letters, and that if I stayed, lawyers would call me unstable and take my baby.
I left before Nathan came home.
“I should have found you,” I said.
Nathan shook his head. “I should have looked harder.”
His phone rang. He listened, and his expression changed.
“What?” he said. “Grace has been at the hospital with me the entire time.”
He ended the call and faced me.
“A police report says you took Lily from a relative’s care this afternoon. It says you’re booked on a flight out of the country tonight.”
“That’s impossible.”
“The report includes photographs of travel documents.”
“I don’t have passports.”
I pulled Lily closer. Victoria had been in the kitchen less than two hours ago. Someone had prepared this before she picked up the stick.
Nathan called his attorney, Daniel Price.
Daniel arrived after sunset carrying a thin folder. He spoke quietly with Nathan outside our room. Through the glass, I watched Nathan’s face harden.
When they came in, Daniel said officers were on their way. He had asked them to verify the report before taking any action.
“Can you do that?” I asked.
“I can make sure they hear the truth,” he said.
Then he placed a sealed envelope in Nathan’s hand.
“Your father left instructions for me to give you this if anyone ever made a claim about a child. I was told never to open it.”
Nathan looked at the familiar handwriting on the front. His name was written in thick blue ink.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know there was a child,” Daniel said. “I’m sorry.”
Nathan broke the seal. I watched him read the first page.
His face lost all color.
“What does it say?” I asked.
He looked at Lily, then at me. His hand was shaking.
May you like
Daniel leaned close enough for only us to hear.
“Your father knew everything.”
