Chapter three

The rain was a cold, relentless weight as I stumbled up the driveway of my childhood home. My clothes were shredded, my face was bruised from where the reporters had shoved their cameras, and my heart was a jagged hole in my chest.

I pounded on the heavy oak door. "Dad! Please! Open the door!"

The lights flickered on. The door swung open, but there was no hug waiting for me. My father stood there, his face twisted in a mask of pure, unadulterated shame. Beside him, my stepmother, Beatrice, clutched her silk robe, looking at me like I was a stray dog covered in filth.

"You have a lot of nerve showing your face here after that circus at the Vane mansion," my father hissed.

"Dad, Lydia framed me! She put that diamond in my bag! And Charlie... he threw me out. I’m pregnant, Dad. I need help."

"Pregnant?" Beatrice let out a sharp, mocking laugh. She stepped forward, scanning my body with a look of utter disgust. "Look at you, Elara. You’re bloated, messy, and pathetic. No wonder Charlie wants nothing to do with you. You’ve always been the 'heavy' one, the 'clumsy' one. You couldn't even keep a husband for three years without turning into a common thief."

"I didn't steal anything!" I sobbed.

"Shut up!" my father roared, his voice echoing in the grand foyer. "Lydia is a saint. She suffered for years because of your 'accident,' and the moment she recovers, you try to ruin her life again? You’re just like your mother. A weak, dramatic embarrassment to the Vance name. Every time I look at you, I see her failures."

"My mother loved me!" I shrieked.

"Your mother was a ghost who didn't know how to survive in this world, and neither do you," Beatrice sneered. She picked up a pitcher of ice water from the side table and, without a second thought, flung the contents directly into my face.

The shock of the freezing water stole my breath. I gasped, shivering as the ice cubes hit the floor around my feet.

"Get off my porch," my father said, his voice dropping to a deadly, flat tone. "You aren't a Vance. You're a stain. It would have been better for this family if you had died in that lake twenty years ago instead of being 'saved.' Don't ever come back. If I see you on my property again, I'll have you arrested for trespassing."

The door slammed in my face. The lock clicked a heavy, final sound that severed the last thread of my childhood.

I collapsed onto the wet grass, shaking so hard I couldn't stand. I was twenty-one, pregnant, homeless, and branded a criminal by the two most powerful families in the city.

"Miss Elara?"

A small, hushed voice came from the side of the house near the servant's entrance. It was Nanny Martha. She was eighty years old and had been the only person who ever looked at me with kindness after my mother passed.

She hurried over, wrapping a thin, worn shawl around my shoulders. She was crying. "Oh, my poor lamb. I saw... I heard everything."

"Martha, I have nowhere to go," I whispered, my teeth chattering.

"Listen to me," she said, her voice urgent as she pressed a heavy, weathered envelope into my hands. "This is from your mother. She gave it to me right before she died. She told me, 'Give this to Elara only if the world turns its back on her.' It’s the money from her secret inheritance, and the deed to her old cottage in London."

I looked at the envelope, stunned.

"Go, Elara," Martha urged, kissing my forehead with trembling lips. "Get out of this city. Go to a place where you are needed, where you are valued. This place... it’s full of monsters. You go and you raise that baby, and you become the woman your mother knew you could be. I’ll be praying for you every single night, my brave girl."

"Martha, I can't leave you here

"I'm an old woman, they won't bother with me," she whispered, glancing back at the house. "Go! Before they see us!"

I stood up, clutching that envelope to my chest like it was a shield. I looked at the dark windows of the house that had birthed me and then broken me.

"I'm going, Martha," I said, my voice suddenly losing its tremor. A cold, hard resolve was beginning to settle in the pit of my stomach, right next to the life growing inside me. "But tell them one thing if they ever ask. Tell them Elara Vance is dead. Because the woman who comes back... she won't be their daughter."

I turned into the dark, rainy night and started walking toward the station. I didn't look back once.