All Chapters of Ex Husband, Prepare To Burn : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Elara's POV"She doesn't spook," the stable owner said, handing me the reins. "Crowds, flags, gunfire on film shoots. Nothing moves her unless you move her.""What's her name?""Justice." He said it without a trace of irony, checking the girth strap a final time. "The previous owner had a sense of humor."I didn't laugh, because the previous owner was Morticia. That lady had anything but a sense of humor.The bridle path ran exactly as the deed said it would — service road, then trees, thirty years of nobody, branches grown low enough that I rode the first kilometer bent over the mare's neck. Through the leaves the Haverton came up in pieces. White chairs. The drone hanging over the lawn like a patient insect. Three hundred guests and a string quartet playing something that had been played at my own wedding, ten years and one ocean ago.My phone had gone to Liam four times since dawn. Four rings each, then nothing. Ivy couldn't raise him. Marco said Thursday, a pushed fitting, a note,

Elara's POV"Madam, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I only turned around for —""Mrs. Adele." I took both her hands before the rest of the sentence could break her. "Look at me. Where are Noah and Emily?""Upstairs. Sleeping. The police lady is with them — they wouldn't sleep, and then they did, all at once, the way they do." Her hands were cold in mine, twenty-two hours after, still cold. "Madam, the garden — I only went in for the sunscreen, Claire wanted her yellow hat, and when I came back the gate —""You went in for sunscreen because it was hot and she is four and burns in twenty minutes. You did your job." I said it slowly, once, and watched it fail to land, and knew it would need saying a hundred more times before it did. "Now I need everything. From the beginning, in order."The house didn't feel like my house. Fourteen hours in the air and I'd walked through my own front door into a place with two federal officers in the kitchen, a technician doing something to the landline, and

Elara's POV"Mooring nine."Danvers said it from the bottom of my stairs at six in the morning, phone still in her hand.I came down fully dressed, and behind me Ian appeared in the hallway with both phones like he'd never gone to bed at all."A cruiser, forty-foot, registered to a shelf company in Brisbane eleven weeks old. Thermal picked up one adult male on board at four a.m. One." Danvers held my eyes while the number landed. "We go in thirty minutes. You can be at the staging point. You cannot be on the water. That's the deal.""Take it," Ian said quietly behind me, before I could bargain. "Elara. Take the deal."The staging point was a boat ramp with a public toilet block and a view of grey water folding itself over and over. I stood at the bonnet of Danvers' car with a radio I wasn't allowed to speak into and watched two inflatables cross the river in the flat dawn light like they had nowhere urgent to be, which is how professionals cross water. Ian stood on the other side of

Elara's POV"Sit down, Ms. Rhodes.""I heard you the first time."The doctor — Calloway, her badge said, careful eyes, a voice trained not to give anything away before the sentence was ready — didn't push it twice. She just waited until I sat, because some part of me had already understood that whatever came next needed a chair under it, and had sat down out of self-preservation rather than obedience."The aneurysm is larger than the original imaging suggested. Six years old, at minimum, possibly older — these don't announce themselves until they choose to." She turned her tablet so I could see the scan without pretending I'd understand it. A pale shape, a small swollen knot on a branch of grey lines. "Today's collapse wasn't the aneurysm rupturing. It was a warning shot — a minor bleed, contained, which is the only reason your father is currently awake and telling my nurse she has excellent bone structure."Something in my chest that had been braced for the worst word let go by exact

Elara's POV"It's already out."Ivy said it the second I picked up, no preamble, which told me how bad it was before she'd said a single detail. "Sydney Morning Herald has it. Financial Review's picking it up within the hour. Missing SM Group heiress presumed dead is Dave Sullivan's biological daughter — that's the headline, word for word, someone at the hospital sold the boardroom collapse and the DNA both.""Both.""Both. And they've connected it to the wedding footage from New York, and to the gala five years ago, and someone's dug up the old obituary — yours, from five years back, they ran your photo next to Sullivan's collapse footage like a magic trick." Ivy's voice, usually a wall, had a crack of genuine alarm in it. "This isn't a story anymore, Elara. This is the story. There are three vans outside SM Group New York and I'm told two outside the Sydney office and I don't know what's outside your house because I'm afraid to ask."I looked out my own front window. Four vans. A fi