He Gave My Daughter’s Heart to His Mistress’s Son Chapter 08

He Gave My Daughter’s Heart to His Mistress’s Son Chapter 08

He threatened my daughter’s heart in writing.

in writing.

My father’s lead attorney-a silver-haired woman named Vance who smiled the way sharks smile-read the note twice and actually laughed out loud.

“He put extortion on paper,” she said. “Signed it. God bless him.”

The custody hearing lasted forty minutes.

Grant arrived in his last good suit, with a discount lawyer and his sincerity turned up to maximum. He spoke about fatherhood. About redemption. About a man broken by powerful families on all sides. He cried at the right moments. Eleven years of watching him perform for patients’ families, and I could still admire the

craftsmanship.

Then Vance stood up.

She entered the falsified paternity test he’d commissioned to disown Lily. The allocation record where he’d signed away Lily’s heart. Hospital security footage of him telling me, in a public hallway, to stop calling her his daughter because it was embarrassing. Eleven months of Lily’s hospitalization records, during which he had visited her exactly four times. And finally, the extortion note, blown up on a screen six feet tall, his own handwriting demanding thirty million dollars with a taunt about a sick child’s heart as the closing line.

“Your Honor, Vance said, “the petitioner disowned this child when she was inconvenient, attempted to monetize her when she became valuable, and threatened her health in writing when refused. We’re not here to debate his parenting. We’re here to establish that he should never again be in a room with her.”

The judge granted me full custody. Termination of Grant’s parental rights. A restraining order-five hundred feet from me, from Lily, from any Whitlock property.

Grant sat very still while it was read. Then he stood up, and looked at me across the courtroom, and what

was in his face wasn’t grief.

It was hatred. Pure, distilled, patient hatred.

He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me until the bailiff moved him along, and the look followed me out of

the courthouse and into my car and all the way home.

That night, my parents threw a small dinner-just family, to celebrate. Lily, three weeks post-transplant and already terrorizing the household staff, demanded that Dr. Caleb be invited “because it’s his heart too, kind of.” He came. He brought her a toy stethoscope. She made him listen to her drum.

After dinner, I finally cornered my father in his study.

“The Ashfords,” I said. “Caleb said to ask you.”

My father’s whole face changed-softened backward thirty years. He pulled an old photo album from a shelf

and opened it to a page he clearly knew by heart.

A garden. A laughing baby girl in a yellow dress-me, before. And holding my chubby hands, steadying me on/ my feet with the fierce concentration of a six-year-old entrusted with the crown jewels, a small dark-haired boy

“Caleb Ashford,” my father said. “The Ashfords had the estate next to ours. That boy spent every afternoon of your first eight months appointing himself your bodyguard. Wouldn’t let anyone else push your pram.” His voice roughened. “The day you were taken, he searched the hedges for hours. He was six. He kept saying hed

promised to watch you.”

“Promised,” I whispered.

“He announced at your christening-loudly, mid-ceremony-that he was going to marry you when you both grew up. The whole church laughed.” My father turned the page. The same boy, older, unsmiling, at what must have been a memorial gathering. “He never quite stopped looking, Aria. He went into pediatric cardiology and joined my missing-children foundation board at twenty-six. He’s run the DNA registry’s medical arm for years. The registry that found you.”

The floor tilted gently under me. The

“He’s known since the night of the match,” my father said. “He asked me not to tell you. He said- my father smiled, “-he said you’d had enough people demand things from you, and he’d rather earn his way in from the

beginning, like a stranger.”

I walked out of the study in a daze-and my phone rang.

Unknown number. I answered.

Sloane Hale’s voice, and it was nothing like the woman with diamond studs. It was ragged. Terrified.

“Aria. Listen to me. Don’t hang up.” A shaking breath. “Grant came to my apartment tonight. He’s lost his mind -he kept saying you took everything, that you owe him a life. Aria-”

Her voice dropped to a whisper.

“He bought a hammer. He showed it to me. He says he’s going to take back what’s his.”