Evelyn knew, intimately, that I was an orphan.

She knew I had no parents to call, no siblings, no family in the world to come running when I was in trouble.

It was a fact about me she had always regarded with a faint, aristocratic distaste, as though my lack of family were a species of poverty, a deficiency I had brought into her precious bloodline.

And now she had weaponized it, with surgical cruelty, in seven words on a scrap of hotel stationery. Let’s see who comes for you now. She was not merely abandoning me.

She was savoring it.