HER SECRET HEIRS: TEN BROTHERS STAND GUARD

Chapter 2: The Woman at the Door

Evelyn's POV:

I did not sleep that night. I lay in the dark with one hand on my stomach and the other clutching my phone, reading Aunt Mirabel's message over and over until the words blurred together. Someone was looking for me. Someone who claimed to be my real family.

I had grown up knowing I was not wanted. My adoptive parents, the Stones, kept me until they had their own twins, Glory and Mabel, and after that I became the leftover child. They shipped me off to Aunt Mirabel when I was nine, and she raised me on a schoolteacher's salary in a two-bedroom flat that always smelled like fresh bread and old books.

Aunt Mirabel never made me feel like a burden. She was the only person in my life who had ever chosen to love me on purpose.

But a real family? Blood relatives searching for me? That was a door I had locked shut years ago and buried the key.

I wanted to call her back, but my phone battery had died, and the charger was in Richard's study. I was not about to knock on that door tonight. Not after what he had said about the baby.

By morning, I had made two decisions. First, I would sign the annulment papers. Second, I would never tell Richard about the baby. He did not deserve to know.

I got dressed and came downstairs at half past seven. Richard was already gone. His coffee cup sat in the sink, still warm, and the annulment papers lay on the kitchen counter exactly where I had left them, except now there was a pen placed neatly beside them.

He had left me a pen like a reminder, like a deadline.

I was reaching for it when my phone rang. I had plugged it in downstairs before dawn, and now Aunt Mirabel's name lit up the screen.

"Aunt Mirabel, I got your message. What is going on?"

"Evelyn, are you sitting down?"

"No. Should I be?"

"Sit down, child."

I pulled out a kitchen chair and sat.

"A man came to see me yesterday. He said his name is Emmanuel Valentine, and he is a lawyer from the capital. He brought documents, Evelyn. Birth records, hospital files, DNA reports. He says you were stolen from your family when you were two days old."

The kitchen tilted sideways. I gripped the edge of the table. "Stolen?"

"Your birth mother's name was Sarah Valentine. She died eight years ago, but before she passed, she told her sons to never stop searching for you. You have brothers, Evelyn. Three biological brothers and three cousins on your mother's side, and they have been looking for you for twenty-six years."

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.

"The lawyer wants to arrange a meeting. He says your eldest brother, Benjamin Valentine, is already in this city. He has been here for two weeks, searching."

My doorbell rang, and I nearly dropped the phone. "Aunt Mirabel, someone is at the door. I will call you back."

"Evelyn, wait, do not hang up..."

I ended the call and walked to the front door, my head still spinning from what I had just heard. When I opened it, a young woman stood on the porch. She wore a cream-colored dress, designer sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair, and red lipstick that looked like it cost more than my entire wardrobe.

She looked me up and down and smiled the way a cat smiles at a mouse.

"So you are Evelyn," she said. "Smaller than I expected."

"Who are you?"

She stepped past me into the house without waiting for an invitation, and the click of her heels echoed across the marble floor. She turned in a slow circle, examining the living room like a buyer at an auction.

"These curtains need to go," she said. "And that painting above the fireplace is awful. Who picked it out? Do not tell me it was you."

"I asked you a question. Who are you, and why are you in my house?"

She pulled off her sunglasses and looked at me with big, pretty eyes that held no warmth at all.

"My name is Tonia Sinclair, and I am Richard's future wife. His mother, Sylvia, invited me to stay here. You can call her to confirm if you like."

The name hit me like a glass of ice water. Tonia Sinclair. Richard had whispered that name in his sleep once, about a year into our marriage. I had been lying awake in the dark, and he had come into the wrong room by mistake, collapsed on the bed, and murmured her name into the pillow before rolling over.

I never asked him about it. I already knew the answer would break me.

"Richard's mother told me a guest would be coming," I said carefully. "She did not mention who."

"Well, now you know." Tonia set her designer bag on my coffee table and sat on the arm of my sofa like she owned it. "I hear you have already received the annulment papers. That is good. The sooner you sign, the sooner this whole awkward situation goes away."

"How do you know about the papers?"

"Richard and I have been talking for months, Evelyn. Did you really think he decided this on his own?" She laughed, and the sound was light and sharp like breaking glass. "We were together before you came along. I was studying music overseas when his accident happened, and by the time I came back, you had already taken my place."

Three years ago, Richard had been in a terrible car crash. The doctors said he had a thirty percent chance of surviving, and his grandmother, Elizabeth, was so afraid of losing him that she wanted him to be married before he died. She believed it would bring him luck, some old family tradition about married men being harder for death to take.

Every woman Richard had ever dated vanished the moment they heard the news. Nobody wanted to marry a man who might not wake up.

I was Elizabeth's caretaker at the time, and I owed her everything. She had paid off the debts my adoptive parents dumped on me and treated me like a granddaughter. When she begged me with tears in her eyes, I said yes.

Richard woke up three weeks after the wedding. He did not even know I existed until his mother told him he had a wife.

"I did not take anything from you," I said quietly. "You left. I stayed."

Tonia's smile disappeared. "You were a placeholder, Evelyn. A warm body in a hospital room. Do not pretend it was anything more than that."

My phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. I glanced at it and saw Sylvia's name on the screen. Richard's mother rarely called me, and when she did, it was never to say anything kind.

"You should answer that," Tonia said. "She will want to make sure you are treating me well."

I picked up the phone. "Hello, Sylvia."

"Have you met Tonia?" Sylvia's voice was as cold as always.

"Yes."

"Good. Make sure the blue guest room is ready for her by tonight. And Evelyn, do not make this difficult. Richard has already made his decision, and for once in your life, try to leave with some dignity."

The line went dead.

I set the phone down and looked at Tonia, who was watching me with a satisfied expression, like a chess player who had already won the game and was just waiting for the other side to tip over their king.

"You heard her," Tonia said. "Now, about that guest room..."

I picked up the annulment papers and the pen Richard had left for me, and I signed my name on the last page without reading a single word.

Tonia's eyes widened. "That was fast."

"You wanted me gone," I said. "So I am going."

I turned and walked toward the stairs, and my hand brushed my stomach as I climbed. Whatever happened next, there was one thing Tonia, Sylvia, and Richard would never find out about.

At least, that was what I told myself, but when I reached the bedroom, I froze in the doorway, because sitting on the bed, right on top of my pillow, was the pregnancy test I had hidden in the drawer that morning.

Someone had found it.