I caught my husband sleeping with my brother’s wife, so I quietly swapped the lubricant in his bag for industrial glue.

She looked at the folder, then at me.

“I prevented an inheritance war.”

The meaning arrived slowly.

Then all at once.

“You used them.”

“It was more complicated than that.”

“You used my embryos.”

Brandon stared at her in disbelief.

“Who carried the child?”

My mother’s gaze moved toward one of the security monitors.

A camera showed the front entrance upstairs.

Someone had entered the house.

Serena.

She was soaked from the rain, one hand gripping the shoulder of a teenage girl standing beside her.

The girl looked frightened and confused.

She had dark hair, pale skin, and unmistakably familiar eyes.

My eyes.

For a moment, no one in the archive room breathed.

Brandon looked from the monitor to me.

Then to my mother.

“No,” he whispered.

My mother closed her eyes.

The hidden door upstairs opened, and Serena’s voice echoed faintly down the staircase.

“Eleanor! It’s over. She deserves to know.”

I stared at the girl on the screen.

She appeared to be about fourteen.

Fourteen years earlier, my mother had convinced me to delay starting a family until Julian and I were settled.

Fourteen years earlier, Serena’s family had first received money from an Ashford account.

Fourteen years earlier, my mother had begun building a future I knew nothing about.

“Who is she?” I asked.

My mother opened her eyes.

Before she could answer, the lights went out.

The monitors vanished into blackness.

A mechanical lock snapped into place above us.

Brandon rushed toward the staircase, but the hidden door had sealed.

Then the emergency lights flickered on, bathing the archive room in dim red.

A warning message appeared across the central monitor.

REMOTE DELETION INITIATED.

My mother stared at it.

“That isn’t possible.”