I had thought hard about why I was doing it, because a woman in my position does not need to do anything at all; I could have taken my daughter and my fortune and my quiet and simply lived.

But I kept returning to a single, uncomfortable fact about that night in the delivery room.

I had been saved by my own advantages.

I happened to be the architect of the trust.

I happened to have Tamsin’s number in my phone and the standing to use it.

I happened to have a father with an estate to flee to and the means to fight a billionaire to a standstill.

Strip away any one of those, and the very same cruelty — the husband, the mistress, the erased daughter, the cold arithmetic of a family that valued a boy over a girl — would have landed on a woman with nowhere to go and no one to call, and it would have flattened her, and the world would never have heard a word about it.