Page 107 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

She let out a world-weary sigh. “Fine. I was having a very emotional talk with Felicity. She let her guard down—she’s so soft-hearted—and I…” She paused. “Borrowed the keys.”

She looked at me.

“Happy?”

“Thrilled,” I muttered.

Then her eyes narrowed.

“You didn’t tell me about your accident. If I hadn’t stopped by Felicity’s, I wouldn’t have known at all. Were you planning to keep it from me forever?”

I turned back toward the kitchen.

“That was the plan, yes.”

She huffed. I heard her footsteps pattering after me, quick and indignant.

“And to think I was worried sick.”

I opened the fridge. The cool air washed over my face, a brief, welcome reprieve from both the kitchen and my mother, and I reached inside for a bottle of water.

Sariah Quinn was many things.

Smart. Funny. Devastatingly beautiful.

But ‘worried about me’ was never one of them.

She had barely begun university when a one-night stand with a classmate left her pregnant.

With me.

I was neither planned nor, as I eventually came to understand, particularly wanted.

But a secret that big was impossible to keep buried when your father was Aldric Quinn. The moment he learned that his daughter was pregnant—and planning not to be—he was on a plane.

He arrived with the brisk efficiency of a military campaign. He took her home, laid down the law, and made his position perfectly clear. There would be no ambiguity, no discussion, and certainly no opportunity for her to mistake his wishes for a suggestion.

The one thing Aldric Quinn loved above all else was his legacy.

His company was his life’s work, his monument. He had built it to outlive him, which meant, naturally, that it required someone to inherit it. A legacy, to a man like Aldric, was not complete without an heir.

He needed one more than he valued his daughter’s happiness.

He had loved his wife deeply and never remarried after her death, despite his desperate desire for a son. He had never believed that a daughter could properly inherit what he had built. There were qualities he associated with succession—authority, hardness, a certain instinct for command—which he had decided belonged more naturally to men. But there were no other options, no convenient son waiting somewhere in the wings, and so he settled upon the only solution: he would mold Sariah into his heir through sheer force of will.

Her own dreams were beside the point. From the moment she was old enough to understand numbers, he began feeding her business lessons, teaching her markets, margins, and what he considered the language of men for whom business was not merely a livelihood but a measure of worth.

But Sariah Quinn was never one to be controlled. The tighter he squeezed, the more recklessly she rebelled.

My conception had been an accident, but it presented an opportunity to them both.

To Aldric, it was the universe, obligingly providing the solution he had been unable to devise for himself: a new heir he could shape from the beginning, before rebellion or independence or any of the inconvenient qualities that made Sariah so difficult to govern had taken root.

To Sariah, I was leverage.

She struck a hard bargain. She would carry the pregnancy to term, but only if he signed away her freedom. No more demands that she join the company. No more interference in her choices, her career, her life. He would leave her alone. When he hesitated, she made her threat explicit: agree, or she would terminate the pregnancy.

He agreed, but with one non-negotiable condition of his own. To avoid scandal, and to give his future heir the legitimacy he considered essential, Sariah would marry the father. Once the baby was born, she would surrender full custody to Aldric.