Gavin slipped me out through a service door that same night.

He drove me to my grandmother’s old house in Portland—a mansion with yellow walls and creaking floors that seemed to remember every family secret.

I’d spent my childhood summers there, before my mother died and before Jared Harlan appeared in my life like some kind of prince.

The photograph in the anonymous message showed my mother, Abigail Cooper, standing beside a man who wasn’t my legal father.

On the back, someone had written in blue ink: If anything happens to me, do not trust the Harlan family.