Chapter 2

They discharged me at dawn with a manila envelope containing my final payment — $200,000, the agreed-upon price for nine months of pregnancy, eighteen hours of labor, and the permanent removal of my daughter from my life.

The check felt like it weighed nothing. Like holding air. Like holding a lie.

I stood on the hospital sidewalk in paper slippers and a thin robe, the September wind cutting through me, and stared at the envelope until the numbers blurred. Two hundred thousand dollars. That's what my body was worth. That's what my daughter was worth. Divided by the 273 days I'd carried her, it came to $732.60 per day.

Less than the nightly rate at Marcus's hotel.

"Ma'am?" A cab driver had pulled up, his window down. "You need a ride somewhere?"

Where? Where exactly does a woman go when she's been emptied of everything that matters?

I gave him the only address I had left — a studio apartment in the Bronx that I'd rented secretly three months ago using cash I'd skimmed from the grocery allowance Marcus gave me. He'd monitored my bank accounts, my credit cards, my phone — but he never checked the change from the organic produce he insisted I eat for his baby's health.

The apartment was a box. Four hundred square feet of cracked tile and yellowed walls, furnished with a mattress on the floor, a folding chair, and a mini-fridge I'd bought at a pawn shop. But it was mine. The only thing in the world with my name on it that Marcus couldn't take away.

I sat on the mattress and opened the manila envelope with steady hands. Behind the check was a stack of documents — the final dissolution of our contract marriage, effective immediately. No alimony. No visitation rights. No legal acknowledgment that I had ever been anything more than a vessel.

And clipped to the last page, a handwritten note on Sinéad's personal stationery — cream-colored, monogrammed, scented with the jasmine perfume that had haunted my marriage like a ghost:

"Thank you for your service. She has Marcus's eyes. — S"

I read it three times.

Then I folded it carefully, placed it back in the envelope, and threw up in the kitchen sink until there was nothing left inside me.

For three days, I didn't leave the apartment. Didn't eat. Didn't shower. I lay on that mattress and stared at the water stain on the ceiling that looked like a map of nowhere, and I let the grief do what it wanted — tear through me, drown me, burn me alive from the inside.

On the fourth morning, my phone buzzed with a notification from a tabloid news app I'd forgotten to delete:

"HALE INDUSTRIES CEO MARCUS HALE AND GIRLFRIEND SINÉAD CROSS DEBUT 'THEIR' NEWBORN DAUGHTER AT EXCLUSIVE MANHATTAN GALA. 'We're so blessed,' Cross told reporters. 'She's our little miracle.'"

Below the headline was a photo of Sinéad in a white gown, holding my daughter — my daughter — while Marcus stood behind her with his hand on her waist, both of them smiling for cameras that captured a lie so complete it looked like truth.

My baby was wearing a christening dress that cost more than my rent. She looked clean and fed and small and mine, and they were parading her through a ballroom like a trophy they'd won.

Something inside me shifted. Not broke — I was past breaking. This was something harder, something with teeth.

I screenshot the article. Saved the photo. Then I opened my laptop and began to type.

Things I need:

1. A lawyer who isn't afraid of the Hale family

2. Proof that the contract was signed under duress

3. My daughter

My phone rang. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer, but something — instinct, desperation, fate — made me swipe.

"Ivy Castillo?" A man's voice, deep and calm.

"Who is this?"

"Someone who knows what Marcus Hale did to you. And someone who can help you get your daughter back."

The line went silent, waiting. My heart slammed against my ribs.

"I'm listening," I said.