Chapter 11:

🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙 🍙

By the seventh month, the apartment felt too small and too quiet, so I moved into the Hadley Manor. Cecilia met me at the door with a velvet box.

“Although you haven’t had the wedding yet, you’re part of this family.” She pressed the box into my hands. “My welcome gift. Please don’t refuse it.”

Inside, a set of rubies. Deep red, the color of old wine, each stone cut to catch light from every angle. I started to protest, but Cecilia closed my fingers around the box and squeezed, and her expression made it clear that refusal was not among the available options.

Phoebe was in the sitting room. She saw the rubies. Her face went through a rapid sequence of emotions — surprise, envy, fury — before settling on a blank mask that fooled no one.

I sat down beside her, adjusting my dress over my belly, and said, with a casualness that I will admit was not entirely innocent, “Conrad says I’m going through a lot with the pregnancy, so he bought me a bunch of Hermès bags. I can’t use them all. Why don’t you choose some?”

Her lips pressed together until they disappeared. Her fists clenched in her lap, knuckles white against the fabric of her skirt. She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

Weeks turned into months. I grew larger, slower, more aware of the weight I carried and the vulnerability it created. Phoebe, meanwhile, announced her own pregnancy and paraded in front of me with a belly that was more ambition than anatomy, one hand resting on it at all times as if posing for a portrait no one had commissioned.

“Freya, don’t think that just because Conrad likes you, you’re going to take Cecilia’s place.” Her voice carried a new edge, sharper than before. “I’m warning you. Everything the Hadleys have will be for my son.”

She said “my son” with absolute certainty, as if she’d placed the order personally.

Then her eyes went to the staircase behind me.

I saw the thought cross her face. It happened in real time — the glance at my belly, the glance at the stairs, the brief, terrible math. At eight months, a fall down those steps wouldn’t just hurt. It could end everything.

She moved.

𝖸𝘰u𝗋 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝗍 fa𝘃𝗼r𝗂𝗍𝘦 𝗿еа𝗱 𝘪𝘀 on 𝗴a𝗅n𝗈vе𝘭𝘀.𝗰𝘰𝗆
I caught her wrist before her hand reached my shoulder. The slap I delivered was hard enough to snap her head sideways, and the sound echoed through the entrance hall like a gunshot.

She covered her cheek, trembling. “How dare you hit me?”

“I’m hitting you for being stupid.” I slapped her again. The other cheek, for symmetry. “Open those dog eyes of yours and look at what’s above your head.”

Phoebe’s gaze traveled up. A high-definition security camera stared down at her from the ceiling, its small red light blinking with patient, indifferent clarity.

“What year do you think this is? Pushing people down stairs is so outdated.”

The color drained from her face. She stood there, one hand on each cheek, the camera recording everything, and for once she had nothing to say.

That night, I called Conrad. He was overseas — some acquisition that required his physical presence — and the connection crackled with distance.

“She tried to push me down the stairs,” I said. No preamble, no softening. Just the facts.

A pause. When he spoke, his voice was even, almost casual, the way it got when he was at his most dangerous.

“If you hit her, then that’s that. She deserved it. Even if you hit Vaughn directly, I’d back you up.” Another pause, shorter. “But the mansion isn’t safe anymore. How about you move?”

I thought about it. The manor was large, old, full of corners and staircases where a pregnant woman could have an accident that looked like gravity. But it was also Cecilia’s house, and Cecilia made me tea every morning and told me stories about Conrad as a child — how he’d organized his toys by market capitalization at age six, how he’d once tried to negotiate his bedtime using a PowerPoint presentation.

“I’ll stay,” I said. “I like it here.”

Whatever Conrad did next, he didn’t tell me about it. But Phoebe vanished from the manor within forty-eight hours, and Vaughn went with her. The house grew quieter, the hallways emptier, and Cecilia and I settled into a routine of tea and television and gentle arguments about baby names.

A few weeks later — at thirty-seven weeks, early but safe for twins — I gave birth to twin boys.

The delivery was long, eleven hours, and by the end of it I was wrecked, hollowed out, convinced that my body would never forgive me. But then the nurse placed two tiny, furious, red-faced strangers on my chest, and they screamed in unison, and the sound was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.

Conrad held them both at once, one in each arm, and I watched his face cycle through emotions he didn’t have names for. Winston and Cecilia were euphoric. They organized a three-day banquet at a seven-star hotel and donated five million for the children’s good fortune.

Phoebe couldn’t cross the threshold of the manor. Not anymore. The gates were closed, the guest list was short, and her name wasn’t on it.

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