“My name is Maya,” I said, and my voice rang out across the silent ballroom.

“Ten years ago, my daughter, Chloe, died giving birth to your biological son.

She was eighteen years old.

She had been an intern at your firm.”

Gasps rippled outward through the crowd like a stone dropped in water.

The news cameras that had been trained on the podium swung around, one after another, and I felt their lenses find my face, felt the sudden heat of their attention, and I did not look away from them and I did not look away from him.

Julian Vance’s face, up on that terrace, went from confusion to something else, something I had waited ten years to see, an icy, draining, terrified pale.