I could have used the secret as a weapon. Carson certainly deserved it.
But I had a newborn daughter in my arms, and I had already decided something, in the clarity that came after the breaking.
I was not going to raise my child inside a war over whose bl*od was whose.
I was going to get her out.
PART 3
Carson would not let it go. Of course he wouldn’t. Pride like his doesn’t bend; it only breaks, and it insists on breaking in public.
In the weeks after I left the hospital — with Iris, with my dignity, and with Lauren already filing the divorce — Carson escalated exactly the way the Rutherfords always do. He didn’t just want a private test anymore. He wanted me humiliated. He told his family I had refused a DNA test, framing my refusal as a confession, painting me to his bl*odline-proud relatives as the unfaithful wife who had tried to pass off another man’s child as a Rutherford heir.
