Chapter 5: The Geography of Hope

Six months later, the golden-hour sunlight spilled like liquid honey across the hardwood floors of my sprawling estate on Lake Geneva. A gentle breeze pushed off the water, billowing the sheer white curtains of the nursery.

Chloe sat in a plush, overstuffed rocking chair, swaying gently. Cradled against her chest was a sleeping infant. Chloe had named her Hope—not as a cliché, and certainly not because the world had been gentle to them.

She named her Hope because the darkness had tried its absolute best, and the darkness had failed to destroy her.

The world outside our sanctuary had violently rearranged itself in the wake of that morning at the clinic.

Saint Aurelia Women’s Medical Center no longer carried the Thorne name anywhere on its sprawling campus. The letters had been unceremoniously pried off the granite facade.

The hospital survived the scandal under stringent new leadership, governed by an independent patient-safety board. And I made sure a massive, state-of-the-art domestic-abuse response unit was established on the ground floor—funded entirely by the millions my forensic accountants recovered from Julian’s illegal offshore contracts.