Chapter 20 — Our Future

She has our future.

I have turned those three words over many times since he said them, because they contained the whole of what we had won, and the whole of what I want for my daughter.

Because Wendy Vance had come to that hospital room believing that biology was destiny, that the crescent mark behind Fiona’s ear made her a Vance, made her theirs, bound her irrevocably to a dark family and a dark trust and a dark future she had no say in.

That was the entire premise of the woman in the white gloves: that blood decides, that an inheritance is a cage you are born into, that a child belongs to the family whose traits she carries.