Chapter 2 - Lucas KnewThe ambulance arrived before the police.
The second was the sound of my stepmother laughing.
And the third was the warm rush of water running down the inside of my legs.
For one frozen second, nobody moved.
Not my father.
Not his twenty-four-year-old wife standing barefoot in the doorway with a champagne glass in her hand.
Not me.
Then I looked down at the dark stain spreading across my black leggings and whispered, “My water just broke.”
My father released my hair as if I had suddenly burned him.
“Don’t start with the theatrics, Hannah.”
The words came from the man who had raised me.
Robert Whitmore.
Fifty-seven years old. Expensive suits. Perfect silver at his temples. A man who could make strangers believe he was generous within five minutes of meeting him.
A man who had just dragged his eight-month-pregnant daughter across wet stone because she refused to hand over the keys to her own house.
Behind him, Madison laughed again.
She was younger than me by seven years.
My father’s wife.
Technically, my stepmother.
I refused to call her that.
She leaned against the front door of the Charleston house my late husband had left me, wearing a pale silk robe as though she had spent the morning at a spa instead of trying to steal a property.
“Oh, please,” she said. “Women have babies every day.”
I stared at her.
My knees were bleeding where they had hit the stone porch.
My handbag lay several feet away.
My phone had skidded from my hand and landed faceup near the bottom step.
The rain had started ten minutes earlier.
Thin, cold, steady.
My father pointed toward the street.
“Get off the property.”
I almost laughed.
“My property?”
“Not anymore.”
He said it with such confidence that for half a second I wondered whether grief and exhaustion had finally broken something inside me.
Three weeks earlier, my husband, Lucas Gallagher, had died when a delivery truck crossed the center line on Highway 17.
He was thirty-six.
We had been married for six years.
Our daughter was due in five weeks.
And in the three weeks since I buried him, my father had gone from pretending to comfort me to demanding access to Lucas’s accounts, his company, and this house.
At first, Robert called it “help.”
Then “family responsibility.”
Then, that morning, he stopped pretending.
He arrived with Madison and two suitcases.
They walked straight into my home.
Madison immediately chose the upstairs guest suite.
My father took Lucas’s study.
When I told them they were not moving in, Robert smiled.
“You’re grieving. You’re pregnant. You’re not capable of managing this estate.”
“I’m capable of telling you to leave.”
That was when the smile disappeared.
Twenty minutes later, I was on my knees in the rain.
My father had one hand twisted in my hair.
Madison was laughing.
And my baby had apparently decided five weeks early was better than spending another minute listening to them.
A contraction tightened across my stomach.
Hard.
Sharp.
I gasped.
Robert glanced at the water pooling beneath me.
For the first time, uncertainty flickered across his face.
Then Madison whispered, “Don’t let her manipulate you.”
That did it.
His expression hardened again.
“You can go to a hospital.”
I stared at him.
“You dragged me out of my house while I’m pregnant.”
“You assaulted me first.”
My mouth fell open.
“I tried to take my keys back.”
“You scratched my wrist.”
He held up his arm.
There was a faint red mark.
Madison smiled.
“I saw the whole thing.”
Of course she had.
I looked toward the security camera over the garage.
My father followed my gaze.
Then he smiled.
“We disconnected those last night.”
Last night.
So this had been planned.
They had entered my home pretending to check on me.
They had disabled my cameras.
And now they believed there would be no proof.
Another contraction came.
I pressed a hand beneath my stomach and crawled toward my phone.
Robert made no attempt to help.
“Call an ambulance,” he said. “Just do it from the sidewalk.”
My fingers closed around the wet phone.
There were dozens of people I could have called.
My doctor.
Lucas’s sister.
My best friend.
Instead, I called a number my father didn’t know I had.
The man answered on the second ring.
“Hannah?”
I closed my eyes.
“Mr. Bennett.”
Silence.
Then his voice changed.
“What happened?”
“I need you to activate Lucas’s emergency instructions.”
My father frowned.
“What emergency instructions?”
I ignored him.
There was another brief silence on the phone.
Then attorney Samuel Bennett said quietly, “Are you certain?”
I looked at my father standing inside my doorway.
At Madison wearing one of my robes.
At my husband’s house behind them.
At the people who had decided grief made me weak.
“Yes.”
Bennett inhaled.
“Then listen carefully. Do not sign anything. Do not give them access to any accounts. Police and medical assistance are being contacted now.”
Robert’s face changed.
Madison lowered her champagne glass.
I continued staring at them.
Bennett spoke again.
“And Hannah?”
“Yes?”
“Your father has made a catastrophic mistake.”
Robert stepped toward me.
“What did he say?”
I slowly pushed myself upright against the porch column.
A siren sounded somewhere in the distance.
Then another.
I looked my father directly in the eye.
“He said you just triggered the one clause Lucas wrote specifically for you.”
May you like
And for the first time that morning, my father stopped looking angry.
He looked afraid.
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