Chapter 13 - The Lawyer Beside Me
Naomi Price disappeared before Bell’s team reached her apartment.
Her phone was found in a trash can outside Union Station.
Sabrina felt a new kind of betrayal. Naomi had been the person telling
her to stay calm, preserve evidence, and trust procedure.
Now documents suggested she controlled the company profiting from
Sabrina’s biology.
Bell cautioned against assumptions.
“A trustee can be a nominee.”
“Everyone in my life is apparently a nominee for something.”
They searched Naomi’s office and found a handwritten note:
SABRINA - IF THEY DISCOVER HELIX, TRUST NO DIGITAL RECORD.
Helix was the biotech company.
A second note contained a bank address in Zurich.
Naomi had not fled as a conspirator. She had left a trail.
Kenneth recognized Helix.
“Rebecca talked about it.”
“Why?”
“She said Orion’s biggest mistake was turning patients into assets.
Helix was the endgame.”
The company planned to patent therapies derived from decades of
Northstar data without compensating or even informing subjects.
Sabrina asked, “Did Naomi work for Rebecca?”
“I don’t know.”
Bell located Naomi at a motel in Wyoming after she voluntarily called
from a landline.
She returned under protection.
“The trust is mine on paper,” Naomi explained. “Rebecca asked me to hold
it so Orion couldn’t seize Helix.”
“You never told me.”
“Because Rebecca believed you were being monitored.”
“I was.”
Naomi handed over trust documents showing she had no beneficial
ownership.
“Then who does?”
Naomi looked at Sabrina.
“You.”
Sabrina laughed in disbelief.
Elaine had secretly transferred controlling rights in Helix to a trust
for Subject 17 years earlier.
If Sabrina’s identity was legally proven, she owned a company worth
billions.
Suddenly every attempt to control her marriage, fertility, shares, and
identity had another motive.
Rebecca had not only wanted Rollins Global.
She wanted Helix.
But Naomi revealed a condition in the trust: ownership transferred only
when the original Subject 17 identity was authenticated using the
missing neonatal blood card.
Rebecca still had leverage.
A message arrived from Rebecca offering an exchange.
She wanted immunity and twenty percent of Helix.
Sabrina replied with one word:
No.
Rebecca called.
“I kept your mother alive.”
“You also ordered a procedure on me.”
Silence.
“Did Kenneth tell you that?”
“The payments did.”
Rebecca’s voice hardened. “You would have had children, and Orion would
have owned them through genetic licensing.”
“You don’t get to rewrite violation as protection.”
“I made terrible choices to prevent worse ones.”
“That sentence is the family disease.”
Rebecca hung up.
Sabrina decided to go public.
Against the board’s advice, she held a press conference revealing
Northstar’s existence, the medical-data abuse, and her own status as
Subject 17.
She did not reveal individual patient identities.
“If my family’s company profited from these violations, we will pay
restitution. If executives committed crimes, we will cooperate with
prosecution. There will be no more private bargains.”
Rollins Global stock plunged.
Richard watched from home.
Afterward, he called.
“You may lose everything.”
“Then I lose it telling the truth.”
He whispered, “I should have done that thirty years ago.”
The public disclosure changed the game. Hundreds of former patients came
forward.
One elderly nurse recognized the twins’ photograph.
She had worked the neonatal unit.
Bell interviewed her.
The nurse remembered Elaine giving birth to two girls.
“One baby died,” she said. “But not the one everyone thinks.”
Sabrina leaned forward.
“Which one?”
“The infant labeled Subject 17 died.”
The surviving infant had originally been Subject 18.
Sabrina’s legal identity was built on her dead twin’s trial number.
“Why switch them?”
The nurse said a physician ordered it after a dosing error.
“Who was the physician?”
“Dr. Thomas Vale.”
Grant’s father.
Sabrina was not biologically the original Subject 17.
That meant the Helix trust might not belong to her.
Rebecca had been right about one thing: identity controlled everything.
Then the nurse added, “Your mother knew.”
Sabrina found Elaine waiting in the hallway.
“You knew I was Subject 18.”
Elaine nodded.
“Why call me Sabrina?”
“Because Sabrina was always the name I chose for the surviving child.
The numbers were theirs, not yours.”
“Then why did you let everyone chase Subject 17?”
Elaine’s face crumpled.
“Because I needed Orion to believe the valuable child survived.”
Sabrina stared at her.
“You used me as bait.”
Elaine whispered, “Yes.”
For the first time since their reunion, Sabrina stepped away when her
mother reached for her.
As the events surrounding the lawyer beside 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
life had called obedience love. Justin, even furious, still allowed her
to say no.
As the events surrounding the lawyer beside me unfolded, Sabrina kept
returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her name.
Denver continued around them with insulting normality. Traffic crawled
along wet streets, restaurants filled for dinner, and strangers
complained about weather while Sabrina’s world kept rearranging itself.
She began to understand why secrets survived so easily. Catastrophe
rarely announced itself to everyone. Most of the time, it happened in
one room while the rest of the city ordered dessert.
As the events surrounding the lawyer beside me unfolded, Sabrina kept
returning to one rule: nobody would make the next decision in her name.
Naomi repeatedly reminded Sabrina to separate what she could prove from
what she believed. “Suspicion is a direction, not a destination,” she
said. Sabrina wrote the sentence in the margin of her notebook. She had
spent years accepting other people’s conclusions. Now she wanted
evidence, even when the evidence embarrassed her.
As the events surrounding the lawyer beside 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 lawyer beside 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 lawyer beside 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
May you like
habit had once made her an exceptional CFO. Now it was helping her
survive her own family.
