“Because you wanted it to be true,” Claudia snapped, going cold and hard.

“You wanted an heir so badly, just to spite her, that you swallowed everything I told you and never asked a single question.

Don’t put this on me.

You wanted the lie as much as I did.”

And then the front doors of the lobby opened, and a man came in flanked by two private investigators and an attorney — a nightclub owner from the north side of the city named Marcus Vance, whose name appeared as the respondent on Claudia’s original support filing, the actual father she had sued and then abandoned.

Claudia closed her eyes.