My husband let his mistress hold my eight-week-old daughter in my nursery while she wore the ivory silk dress I had bought for my own newborn portraits. Two minutes after the photographer sent me the gallery, I knew my marriage was over, but Landon still had no idea those files had reached me. And the photographs were not even the worst thing hiding inside that gallery.

Evelyn Maddox entered the nursery like an empress inspecting a conquered province. At sixty-two, her hair was an immaculate silver bob, her posture aristocratic, her silk scarf fastened with a gold pin.

Right behind her came Harper Quinn.

Harper was twenty-six, slender, and wore a neutral cashmere sweater. But around her neck, gleaming under the nursery lights, hung a familiar piece of jewelry: the antique seed-pearl pendant that my late father had given my mother when I was born.

She hadn't even taken it off.

“Greer, dear,” Evelyn said, not bothering to look at June. “Don’t make this difficult. Landon has explained everything. We know you’re suffering.”

Harper stepped forward, her eyes wide with manufactured empathy. “Greer, nobody is judging you. Postpartum depression is an illness. You don't have to carry this alone.”

She reached down, extending her manicured hands toward my baby. “Here. Let me take June so you can sign the intake consent.”

I stood up.

The motion was sudden and precise. I held June firmly against my chest, backing up until my shoulder blades hit the wall, keeping myself out of the direct line of the hidden camera.

“Don’t touch my daughter,” I said. The tone wasn't screaming; it was glacial, vibrating with an authority Harper had clearly never seen in me.

Harper froze, her hands hovering mid-air. She glanced back at Landon, unsettled.

“Greer,” Landon said, his voice dropping an octave into an irritated warning. “Stop it. You’re scaring the baby.”

“I’m scaring her?” I looked directly at Harper. “Harper, you have five seconds to take off my mother’s pendant before I rip it off your throat.”

Harper’s hand flew to the necklace, color draining from her cheeks. “What? Landon gave this to me—he said it belonged to his family—”

“It belonged to *my* mother,” I said. “Just like the ivory silk dress currently sitting in a dry-cleaning bag in your trunk belonged to me. The one you wore at ten o'clock this morning while sitting in that chair, holding my daughter, posing as Landon’s future wife.”

Silence hit the room like a sonic boom.

Evelyn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Landon, what is she talking about?”

Landon stepped between Harper and me, his jaw clenching hard. The mask of the gentle, concerned husband slipped entirely off his face. “You spoke to Tessa.”

“Tessa was very thorough,” I answered. “She forwarded the entire archive. The model releases. The handwritten amendments. The custody readiness affidavit. And the portal messages where you pretended to be me, fabricating symptoms of psychosis.”

Landon let out a dry, dismissive laugh. “Do you really think a set of newborn pictures is going to save you in front of a family court judge, Greer? My firm represents half the circuit bench in this county. You were hospitalized this morning for postpartum complications. Dr. Vance is a personal friend of my mother’s. His evaluation is already stamped.”

“Your friend Dr. Vance committed insurance fraud then,” I said, pulling my phone from my pocket. “Because while you were drafting that evaluation, I wasn't just being treated for an infection at St. Catherine’s. I was undergoing an independent psychological evaluation by the chief of psychiatric services at the hospital. Clean bill of health. No postpartum depression. No psychosis. Documented, sealed, and already delivered to my attorney.”

Evelyn’s composure cracked. Her hand gripped her handbag until the leather creased. “What attorney?”

“Maeve Sterling,” I replied.