Chapter 10 - The Father Who Raised Me
Sabrina drove to Richard’s house with Bell nearby but out of sight.
Richard opened the door and seemed to know immediately.
“Elaine told you.”
“Did you kill Daniel Mercer?”
“No.”
“Did you know he was my biological father?”
Richard sat down slowly.
“Yes.”
Sabrina felt thirty-six years of memories rearrange themselves.
“Mom had an affair?”
“We were separated for six months. She met Daniel. When we reconciled,
she was pregnant.”
“And you raised me.”
“You were my daughter from the first time I held you.”
“That doesn’t answer the murder.”
Richard explained that Daniel had uncovered early Northstar abuses and
threatened to expose Vale’s father. Days later, Daniel died in a
warehouse fire.
“Elaine believed I ordered it because I had argued with him.”
“Did you?”
“I threatened him. I said I would ruin him if he destroyed the company.”
Richard’s eyes filled.
“But I did not kill him.”
Sabrina wanted to believe the man who had taught her to ride a bicycle
and sat beside her at her mother’s funeral.
Belief was no longer evidence.
Bell reopened the decades-old fire investigation.
Kenneth learned about Daniel and asked to speak with Sabrina.
“My father always said Uncle Daniel died because of the Rollins family.”
“So you married me for revenge too.”
“At first.”
Sabrina laughed bitterly. “How many reasons did you have?”
“Too many.”
Kenneth admitted his father had encouraged him to infiltrate Rollins
Global.
“But when I found Daniel’s old files, I realized Vale was responsible.”
“Then why stay?”
“Because by then I wanted control.”
There it was: the simplest truth.
Kenneth had begun as an avenger and become an opportunist.
Sabrina asked, “Did you ever love me?”
“Yes.”
“That might be the ugliest part.”
Because love had existed beside manipulation without defeating it.
Bell’s team discovered accelerant records linking the old warehouse fire
to a security contractor owned by Vale’s father.
Richard was likely innocent of murder.
But Richard had paid the contractor afterward.
“For silence,” Richard admitted. “I thought they had destroyed records,
not killed Daniel.”
“You financed the cover-up.”
“Yes.”
Sabrina looked at him for a long time.
“You may be my father in every way that mattered growing up. But you
taught me that protecting the company mattered more than telling the
truth.”
Richard bowed his head.
“I did.”
Rebecca resurfaced through a video sent to every Rollins Global
director.
She appeared in a dark room.
“Sabrina has turned a family matter into a public execution,” Rebecca
said. “If she continues, I will release the complete medical histories
of every Northstar subject.”
Sabrina watched in horror.
Thousands of innocent people would have private information exposed.
Rebecca demanded Sabrina resign and transfer voting control to a trust
Rebecca managed.
The board panicked.
“Give her what she wants temporarily,” one director urged.
Sabrina refused.
“If we reward blackmail, it never ends.”
“But the patients—”
“We protect them without surrendering.”
Sabrina worked with cybersecurity teams to locate Rebecca’s archive.
Maya unexpectedly provided the breakthrough. Victor had once mentioned a
cold-storage server farm beneath an abandoned pharmaceutical facility
near Pueblo.
Bell obtained a warrant.
They found servers but no Rebecca.
The archive was encrypted.
A countdown appeared when technicians connected power.
23:59:59.
If they failed to enter the key, data would upload publicly.
Sabrina called Kenneth.
“What’s Rebecca’s encryption phrase?”
“I don’t know.”
“You worked for her.”
“I worked around her.”
“Think.”
Kenneth remembered Rebecca repeatedly quoting a line at family events:
“Blood remembers what paper forgets.”
The phrase failed.
Twenty minutes remained.
Justin arrived with Elaine’s notebook.
“What about the twins’ names?”
They tried SABRINAREBECCA.
Failed.
Five minutes.
Sabrina stared at the old birth certificate.
Subject 17.
Then she remembered Rebecca’s letter: YOU CANNOT HAVE HER.
“Try REBECCA17.”
Failed.
One minute.
Sabrina whispered, “She didn’t want me. She wanted the other baby.”
“What was the other subject number?”
Technicians searched the trial ledger.
Subject 18.
They entered REBECCA18.
The countdown stopped at eleven seconds.
Everyone exhaled.
Then the screen changed.
UPLOAD CANCELED.
SECONDARY PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
Bell frowned. “What secondary protocol?”
A printer in the server room began producing pages.
The first page was a list of names.
Sabrina’s was at the top.
The second was Kenneth’s.
The third was Maya’s.
Beside each name was a dollar amount.
Justin stared.
“What is this?”
Sabrina read the heading.
NORTHSTAR BEHAVIORAL ACQUISITION PROGRAM.
The medical trial had been only the beginning.
For years, someone had been paying people to manipulate the lives of
specific subjects.
And Sabrina’s marriage was listed as one of the interventions.
As the events surrounding the father who raised me unfolded, Sabrina
kept returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her
name.
There were moments when Sabrina wanted the simplicity of the first
betrayal back. An affair had rules she understood: vows broken, trust
destroyed, a marriage ending. What followed had no clean vocabulary.
Family loyalty mixed with corporate fraud, medical decisions with
inheritance, love with surveillance. Every answer contained another
person’s excuse, and every excuse contained a choice.
As the events surrounding the father who raised me unfolded, Sabrina
kept returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her
name.
At night, Sabrina sometimes remembered the woman she had been before
Kenneth: decisive, ambitious, impatient with anyone who confused
confidence with cruelty. Marriage had not erased that woman. It had
trained her to whisper. Each new truth brought the old voice back, not
louder for the sake of drama, but clearer. She no longer needed to win
every room. She needed to remain herself when the room turned against
her.
As the events surrounding the father who raised me unfolded, Sabrina
kept returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her
name.
The silence after each revelation had become familiar to Sabrina, but
familiarity did not make it easier. She had learned to distinguish shock
from fear: shock froze her, while fear tried to make decisions for her.
Now she refused to let either one speak first. She wrote down names,
dates, contradictions, and every question nobody wanted answered. That
habit had once made her an exceptional CFO. Now it was helping her
survive her own family.
As the events surrounding the father who raised me unfolded, Sabrina
kept returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her
name.
Justin had a different way of processing disaster. He paced, argued,
made coffee he forgot to drink, then returned to the same question from
a new angle. Their disagreements became sharper as the stakes rose, but
Sabrina trusted the fact that he challenged her. Too many people in her
May you like
life had called obedience love. Justin, even furious, still allowed her
to say no.
