Page 108 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

She would have her freedom.

He would have his heir.

It was a remarkably tidy arrangement, the sort of solution that could only have appealed to a man who believed that everything from shareholder agreements to human lives could be reduced to terms and conditions.

But life, of course, has a wicked sense of humor.

The plane carrying my father crashed. I never got to know what kind of man he was, or whether he had ever wanted any part of the future that had been arranged for him.

Yet Aldric was undeterred.

His daughter was giving birth out of wedlock? A minor scandal, easily contained. The father was dead? An unfortunate detail, nothing more. Such things could be managed. Explained. Buried beneath enough money and discretion. None of it mattered, so long as the outcome remained the same: he would get his heir.

Then, the universe delivered its punchline.

I was born.

A girl.

His grand plan for a dutiful grandson evaporated in the delivery room. He was left with a granddaughter, and my mother, having fulfilled her side of the bargain, walked out of the hospital and his life with her hard-won freedom.

His perfect, controlled succession plan was in ashes. I would have laughed in his face if I hadn’t been too busy screaming mine off at the time.

But Aldric Quinn was not a man who accepted defeat. He no longer had my mother to control, but he had me: a blank slate, conveniently born from the failure of his first plan. And Aldric was nothing if not meticulous. He learned from his mistakes.

He would not make the same ones with me.

He didn’t simply teach me about business; he immersed me in it.

My nursery rhymes were quarterly reports. My bedtime stories were case studies in corporate takeovers. My tutors were retired CFOs and management consultants.

Business was not something I learned so much as something I grew up inside.

He didn’t forbid a social life; he simply made the boardroom my playground, until his world was the only one I knew well enough to want. There was no rebellion to suppress because he had given me nothing to rebel against. He didn’t raise a daughter who might someday turn against his life’s ambition; he built an heir from the ground up, perfectly calibrated, one who believed the legacy was her own dream.

When he died, I finally laughed in his face.

Because the legacy he had sacrificed my childhood, my mother’s freedom, and a young man’s life for. The empire he burned every bridge to secure for a blood heir was no longer ours.

The moment the ownership papers were signed and the company was mine, I sold it.

Not to the highest bidder. I arranged a management buyout for his brilliant, long-suffering COO, the operational genius who had built the empire alongside him, year after year, while my grandfather dismissed her as nothing more than “hired help” because her name wasn’t Quinn. He had never believed she deserved a legacy of her own.

I handed her the keys to the kingdom he never let her enter. I gave her the legacy, the title, and the authority Aldric Quinn had spent a lifetime withholding.

And with the money from that sale, I eventually founded my own company. I had built something that was unquestionably mine. Not his legacy. Mine.

I took a sip from the bottle and studied my mother, the memory rising sharp and clear.

For the first decade of my life, I didn’t know she existed.

My grandfather never spoke of her. He told me about my father—the tragic plane crash, the young life cut short—but my mother was different. Her absence was deliberate. Calculated. Even as a child, I understood that much. The more desperately I ached to know her, the more he would tighten the informational leash, ensuring my dependence and curiosity were tools he could wield.

Then, in my eleventh year, she simply appeared.

She didn’t ring the bell. She didn’t ask for me. She walked through the front door as though the house belonged to her, demanded to know where her father was from a startled housekeeper, and marched straight toward his study.

I hid behind a marble pillar in the grand foyer, my heart hammering against my ribs, my eyes fixed on the oak door at the end of the hall.