All Chapters of Fake Heiress, Real Desire: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

julia — First-Person POVI had seen that expression before.Not on Alan — Alan didn't do guilt the way other people did guilt. He didn't crumple or deflect or fill the space with explanation. His guilt looked like stillness. Like a man who had made a calculation and was now encountering the cost of it and was not going to pretend the cost wasn't there.I had seen the version of it that came with I handled it wrong.This was a different version.This was the version that came before that sentence. The version that existed in the moment before the admission, when the thing being held was still being held and the person holding it understood they had been caught.He saw me looking at him.And he didn't look away.That was the thing about Alan that I had never been able to reconcile with the parts of him that kept things — he never looked away when he was caught. He absorbed the being-caught with the same controlled stillness he absorbed everything. Which was either the most honest thing a

Julia — First-Person POVEverything still belongs to you.The words existed in the room.I let them exist there for exactly as long as it took for my mind to finish the sentence that Alan had started and arrive at the full shape of what it meant.Blackwater. Transferred into your name. Sole heir.The program that had numbered me.The facility that had tried to make me into a controllable asset before I was old enough to choose anything.The thing that had burned with children inside it.Mine.Legally, technically, documentably mine.I stood up.Not because I had decided to stand up — because my body had made the decision before I had, the specific physical response of someone who could not process what needed to be processed while sitting down. I stood up and I walked to the window and I pressed my hand flat against the glass and I looked out at the estate grounds and I breathed.One breath.Another."Julia," Alan said behind me."Don't," I said. "Give me a moment."He gave me a moment

Julia — First-Person POVShe said: she remembers.I stood in front of the security monitor and watched Kai replay the footage for the third time. The woman at the gate, the moment before she crossed it, her face turned toward the SUV across the road. The specific movement of her lips.She remembers.Not a warning to us.A report.She hadn't just come to the estate tonight to tell me things. She had been sent here to confirm something — to verify that Subject Thirteen's memories were returning, to see for herself how much I knew and how clearly I knew it. And she had reported back, in the three seconds between stepping out of her car and walking through the gate, to whoever was watching from across the road.She remembers.And then she had come inside and told me things anyway.Which meant whatever she had been sent to confirm, she had decided on the walk across the road to do something else with it.That was why she was dead.Not because she had come here. Because she had told me the t

Julia — First-Person POVMy son was in his arms.That was the only fact that existed.Everything else — the alarms, the empty crib, Alan in front of me, Kai scanning the room — all of it collapsed into background. Noise. Static. The specific irrelevance of everything that was not the image on the screen.Eliot.In the arms of a man I had seen once on a phone screen. A man with eyes identical to mine. A man who had spent thirty years in the shadows and had just stepped all the way into the light.My son was not crying.That was the detail my mind fixed on with the desperate specificity of someone who needed something to hold — he was not crying. He was awake, his eyes open, the wide-eyed alertness of a three-month-old who had been moved and was assessing his new environment with the mild curiosity of someone too young to have learned what situations required fear.He was alive.He was not hurt.He was in the arms of the man who had authorized the fire that killed his own wife.The terro

Julia — First-Person POVMy mother was alive.I sat with that.Or tried to.The photograph was still on the tablet screen — Kai had set it on the table between us, face up, and I had been looking at it for approximately three minutes with the specific quality of someone who was looking at something and not fully seeing it because the thing they were looking at was too large for normal vision.My mother.Not young — not the photographs from the estate, not the preserved woman in portraits who had existed before I existed. Older. In her late fifties, maybe sixty. Still beautiful in the way the portraits suggested she had always been beautiful — not the softness of it, the structure of it. The bones. The particular way her face held itself.Standing beside Richard Ashford.Holding my son.With the specific ease of someone holding an infant who understood instinctively how infants were held.She was never in the fire.Or she was in the fire and had walked out of it.And had spent thirty ye