They Erased Me. I Owned Their Empire Chapter 08

Theo looked smaller than I remembered.

My big brother. Six-three. Captain of the rowing team at Boston College. He stood in the doorway of Northgate’s office at three in the morning holding a burned binder against his chest like something alive.

Both of his hands were bandaged.

“You burned yourself,” I said.

“Little bit.” He held it out. “Here.”

I took it. It still smelled of smoke. I opened it, and there was my whole twenty-four-year-old life. The first investor check, for eighty thousand dollars. A sticky note in my handwriting: Don’t quit. Don’t you dare quit.

My throat closed.

“Wren.” Theo’s voice broke on my name. “I need to tell you something. And then you can throw me out.”

We sat on the steps outside the building. Snow. Streetlights. One cab hissing past.

“You know why we stopped doing your birthday?” he said.

“Bianca Day.”

“But do you know why it started?” He stared at his bandaged hands. “Her first Christmas Eve with us, she told Mom

you’d pushed her off the dock at the lake house. That summer. She said she almost drowned. That you told her nobody wanted her, and she should go back where she came from.”

My breath stopped.

“I never touched her.”

“I know that now, I didn’t then. She showed Mom a bruise. Cried for an hour. Said she was scared of you.” He swallowed. “Then she asked if Christmas Eve could be ‘her day’ instead. So she’d have something that was hers. Because she was eleven and her parents were dead and she was crying.”

Sixteen years.

Sixteen birthdays.

Because of one lie told by an eleven-year-old girl.

“Every year she’d watch you,” Theo said. “Watch to see if you’d complain. And if you did, she’d look at Mom like, see?

She’s jealous. She’s cruel. And Mom believed it. Then Dad. Then Miles. And I just…” He wiped his face with his wrist. “I

stopped asking questions.”

“You texted me happy birthday once,” I said quietly. “When I was nineteen. At 11:58 at night.”

“I remember.”

“Then you never did it again.”

“Bianca saw it on my phone. She cried until Mom took it away for a week.” He laughed, broken. “I was twenty-one,

Wren. And I let her take it. That’s the worst part. Somewhere, I always knew. I was just a coward.”

I didn’t say it’s okay.

It wasn’t okay.

“I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to be alone in this. Not again.”

We sat in silence for a long time.

Then I leaned my head on his shoulder. Just for a second.

It was the first time anyone in my family had chosen me.

Marcus’s forensic examiner spent two days on the binder. The bank stamps. The notary’s ink. The paper.

“Authentic,” she said finally. “Every page. Created exactly when it claims.” Then she pulled up Bianca’s wire transfer.

Laid it beside a document on her screen.

“This signature on the forged wire,” she said, “is a perfect overlay of another signature. Same pressure loss. Same tiny

tremor on the W.”

“From what?”

“Your marriage license.”

Callum laughed out loud. “She traced it off the marriage license?”

“Grant had a certified copy,” Theo said. “It was in his desk. I saw it.”

“She traced your signature,” Callum said, “off the document that made you Grant’s wife.”

For the first time in weeks, I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe.

That night, Theo and Callum and I ate takeout on the floor of the conference room. Theo told stories about me at six, building towers out of hotel soap bars. Callum told worse stories about himself at twenty. Something in my chest

unclenched that had been clenched since I was thirteen.

Then my phone lit up.

Priya. One word.

[Wren.]

Then a screenshot.

Bianca’s Instagram. Back to public.

An ultrasound. Grainy. Black and white.

Grant’s hand on her stomach.

Baby Mercer. Coming June. ? Some people build families. Others just buy companies.

The post had been up for nine minutes.

My husband’s name was in the caption.

We weren’t divorced yet.