Julia saw it at seven in the morning.
She was still in her pajamas, hair pulled back, one hand wrapped around her coffee cup and the other scrolling through her phone the way she did every morning checking the weather, checking her messages, checking that the world hadn't done anything too dramatic overnight.
It had.
The headline sat at the top of her news feed like something that had been waiting for her specifically.
"Who Is Julia Hayes? Inside the Calculated Plan Behind the Billionaire's 'Secret Daughter'"
She set her coffee down.
She read it once quickly the way you did when you were hoping you'd misread the title. Then she read it again slowly.
It was thorough. That was the thing that frightened her most. Not the tone, not the accusations — the detail. Whoever wrote this knew
