Dismissed with prejudice.

It meant finished, permanently, with no possibility of being brought again.

It meant that the men who had spent twenty years hunting for any thread that might lead them to Julian’s hidden estate had reached, at last, the end of every thread, and found me standing at the end of it, no longer a secret to be erased but a legally recognized daughter they could not touch.

For twenty years my existence had been the most dangerous fact in my father’s life, the one thing that, if discovered, would have undone everything and put me in danger.