Page 7 of The Heiress

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Staying in my parents’ house to grieve for a few days and get the ball rolling on dealing with major issues like bills was the logical thing to do, but I was also crawling the walls being stuck back home.

Calusa Key was a paradise to most people. But most people didn’t grow up here. I had a feeling it didn’t matter where you spent your childhood—the middle of nowhere, a beach, a mountain, a city—it was always tainted by the memories of growing up. These people knew me when I was a baby. They remembered when I wore my pants backwards in first grade and when I puked on the bus in seventh grade. They remembered when I drove over Mrs. Noble’s mailbox and when I put the wrong amount of baking soda in the cookies for the bake-off and gave everyone really bad gas.

The beaches were lovely, the water warm, the afternoon thunderstorms comforting. I’d probably love living here if I could escape the memories.

The ones involving one Jace Malone in particular. For a split second we were seventeen again. The future was an idea, not a reality. It was nice to hide in that safe space and forget everything was trash.

I don’t know. Not for sure. But it’s possible. More than possible, you are their daughter. Please be careful with this information.

I read and reread that part of the letter until my eyes went bleary. It might have been the exhaustion or it might have been the entire bottle of wine I consumed while sitting alone in the living room the afternoon after the funeral, either way, I wasn’t seeing straight anymore. I blame the combination of grief and misery for making such a rookie mistake.

I googled Georgia and Bernard Roark and their missing daughter. Was it really possible I was not only adopted, butstolen?I still couldn’t get past the idea my parents had lied to me my entire life, so swallowing the rest of the letter, the parts that detailed my mother’s secret suspicion that I might be the infamous missing child, had completely short circuited my wiring.

The internet told me a lot of things I already knew. The Roark family was rich and powerful. Currently the second richest family in the country. They owned Roark Corp, the largest aerospace and defense contractor to the government, but they also made computers and cell phones, owned a cruise line, a hotel chain, and a baseball team. It was the kind of stuff I knew because they were always in the headlines.

What I didn’t know so much about was Baby Victoria. The kidnapping had made international headlines. There were conspiracy theories and made-for-TV movies about the incident, but I’d never seen or heard any of them.

Now I knew why.

My mother suspectedIwas Baby Victoria.

I’m so sorry. I’ll never be able to say it enough. Maybe that’s why I waited until it was too late to apologize. I love you so much and the very thought of losing you broke me apart. I know I didn’t do the right thing keeping my suspicions to myself. I’m selfish and horrible, but I love you too much to let you go.

I just…yeah, that was going to take a lot of time to process. Maybe forever. I honestly didn’t know if I hated my mom or understood her fears. I knew absolutely nothing about my adoption, obviously, and I’d have to exercise my research skills at work to uncover the paperwork, but for now I could use the power of the internet to tell me about Victoria Roark.

She was eleven months old when she went missing from her stroller at a park in New York City. It was the Fourth of July weekend and the nanny had taken the baby out for a walk to see a neighborhood parade. Baby Victoria would be twenty-eight now, just like me. Her birthday was in August, mine was in July. She went missing on July 3rd. I was adopted on August 31st.

I could not rule out the possibility I was Baby Victoria.

So I dug further. She had brown hair and eyes, just like me. Her parents were of French and Greek ancestry, while mine were Italian.

Again, I could not rule out the possibility.

So I did the one thing Ifeltwould give me the answers I needed. I pulled up pictures of Georgia and Bernard.

It was scary how much I looked like Georgia.

I kind of went into a state of shock after that, so I ate my body weight in pizza and fell asleep on my parents’ couch while watching aPoldarkmarathon. I woke up with creases on my face from the couch cushions. I shoved my dad’s laptop under the couch because I didn’t want to see it again for a while.

Maybe not ever.

* * *

I liked getting backto work. To my own house, my routine, and my daily grind. The Excel Research Group was a happy little office in a research park near campus. We were a staff of twenty-two, each with a different background in research. A lot of our work was academic, but nearly half (the highest paying half) was private research.

There was the basic government work we covered for the local cities, counties, and even a couple of state contracts. A lot of that involved data management and verification. We had secure servers and databases that required special access.

Then there were the private accounts. They made our government contracts look like preschool art projects. For these contracts we had completely separate and encrypted servers. Backups were kept offline in two locations. We each had encrypted VPNs for remote access and had to take regular classes in cyber security to keep us up to date on the latest advances...and hacks. I had a special code that tracked anything and everything I accessed on those servers, and yet, this morning I took a chance anyway, accessing the files Hazel assembled last year when she worked on a project involving the Roarks.

If David found out he’d probably be furious. I didn’t care.

My office wasn’t much bigger than a closet, but it got me out of the cubicle farm I’d started in five years earlier. I didn’t have a window, but I did have a huge wood desk and two bookcases where I stored my physical records. There wasn’t room for anything else. No fancy fridge or table or even a chair for a colleague to sit in. If someone wanted to collaborate we either moved to a conference room or they dragged their office chair inside and left the door open.

Some might call it claustrophobic, but I called it cozy. I hung a painting of a library on the wall so that I had a nice view and I kept a fuzzy blanket for when the air conditioner went into overdrive in the summer. If I felt like it, I could pretend I was working in an old library in a cold northern city.

Hazel slid by my door and stopped. As usual, she was dressed for success in a cute pink pencil skirt and cream blouse, her dark hair down in a wave off her right shoulder. “Hey sunshine. Want to come over to our place for dinner? Yara’s making her lasagna tonight.”

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