But he had quietly arranged for Miriam to keep an eye on her through discreet notes and discreet money, because whatever else Lucian Kane was, he had never been able to walk away fully from the women he failed to save.
Now he stood over Celeste’s barely living body and understood, with a cold clarity that left no room for confusion, that her twins might be his.
“Get her out,” he said.
Within thirty minutes an unmarked medical transport rolled through the rear gate. By dawn, Northwestern’s records reflected that Celeste Mercer had died in childbirth and, at the family’s request, been cremated. The paperwork was forged well enough to survive the kind of scrutiny grief usually prevented.
By the time Chicago woke, the woman everyone believed dead was lying in a glass-walled room in one of Lucian Kane’s hidden Lake Forest properties, attached to private machines and watched by doctors whose silence had been purchased at extraordinary rates.
And four days later, the woman sleeping in Celeste’s bed posted a photograph on Instagram.
It was a pair of tiny knit baby shoes resting on white linen. The caption read:
Sometimes life gives you the family you were meant to have.
Paige Holloway had the glossy confidence of a woman who mistook victory for permanence. She was thirty, beautiful in a curated way, and had spent two years believing Brad’s lies about being trapped in a loveless marriage to a fragile woman too weak to understand him. Paige liked surfaces. She liked labels, marble counters, floral arrangements styled to look effortless, and the reflected glamour of other people’s wealth.
By the end of the first week, she had moved into the Whitaker house in Winnetka.
She changed the sheets in Celeste’s bedroom. She boxed up Celeste’s sweaters. She repainted the nursery wall because the original sage green looked “sad.” She let Brad’s mother, Beatrice Whitaker, supervise the rest.
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