Page 184 of One of Those Amnesia Stories

He just stared at me.

I shook my head slowly, letting disappointment settle visibly across my face. “Can’t even hold a glass, Baylee?” I clicked my tongue softly. “Is your old age finally catching up with you?”

“What—” His voice cracked. He swallowed, tried again. “What did you—how do you—”

He sputtered. Words failing him. Power failing him. Even the authority that had seemed so fixed in place until now was slipping away. The satisfaction that curled slowly through my chest was almost enough to warm the cold rage still burning underneath. Almost.

“Baylee?” Cassian whispered beside me, confusion threading through his voice.

I didn’t look at him. Didn’t take my eyes off Michael for a single second.

“Why are you so shocked?” I asked, my voice soft, almost curious, and utterly under my control. “Isn’t that your birth name?”

He was becoming paler with every word, the color withdrawing from his face by degrees, until he looked bloodless. He leaned more heavily against the desk, as if the solid wood were the only thing keeping him upright.

“Your father’s last name. The name you had before your mother married Jameson Hartley.”

The research had been meticulous. I had gone back far enough to find the people who existed before the money, before the Hartley name, before Michael had learned to make himself into someone no one could easily reach. His parents—Emily and Theo Baylee—had been ordinary people. Ordinary lives, ordinary struggles, ordinary dreams. Theo had been a construction worker on a twelve-storey apartment site when the scaffolding gave way beneath him. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Michael was eight.

Two years later, Emily met Jameson Hartley. They fell in love and married quickly, and ten-year-old Michael Baylee was brought into a world so blindingly different, so far removed from the one he had known, that it must have seemed, at first, almost fictional. Private schools, grand houses, people who answered when the Hartley name was spoken. A world of privilege he could never have imagined.

Jameson died when Michael was twenty. He had no children of his own. No siblings. No other family with any serious claim to what he left behind. The entire Hartley fortune—every dollar, every property, every connection—passed to the boy who’d taken his name.

One of the first things Michael did with that power was bury his past.

He made certain no one spoke about Michael Baylee.

The name itself, the history attached to it, the ordinary little boy who had once belonged to an ordinary family—all of it had to disappear, and he was willing to be remarkably thorough about the process. Threats were made. Careers ended. Silences were bought and paid for.

Whatever it took to ensure no one ever spoke of where he’d really come from.

Because here’s the thing about secrets: no matter how tightly you lock them away, no matter how many people you pay off or threaten, something always slips out.

And the way Michael was reacting made one thing clear. He didn’t simply dislike his past.

He hated it. Despised it with an intensity that went far beyond embarrassment, beyond shame, and made the years he had spent erasing every trace of Michael Baylee seem less like vanity than desperation. There was something carefully buried beneath the name, beneath everything he had done to make sure no one remembered where he came from, something he was desperate to keep hidden. I didn’t know what it was.

I didn’t need to know.

I just needed him to believe that I did.

So I smiled at him, warm and pleasant, and let the silence sit until it became unbearable.

His hands were shaking. Visible tremors running through his fingers. He curled his fingers into his palms, attempting to still them, but the effort made it worse. “How do you know that?”

I shrugged. “I have my ways.”

He remained behind his desk, perfectly still except for those traitorous hands, his eyes fixed on me with something that looked like terror. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

I tilted my head, all innocence. “I don’t?”

“No!” His hands slammed against the desk. The sound exploded through the office, sending papers skittering and a pen spinning over the edge to clatter against the floor.

Cassian’s hand landed on the arm of my chair, his grip tight, ready.

“You don’t know anything!” Michael was shouting, his face flushed, whatever composure he’d been clinging to coming apart in ugly little pieces. “Do you have any idea what I had to go through to get here? Any idea how many times I had to fight for what people like you were simply handed?” His eyes flicked to Cassian, then back to me, contempt dripping from every word. “No. Because you were both born with silver spoons shoved so far down your throats you can’t taste anything else.”

He was pacing now, a caged animal, his hands gesturing wildly. “You don’t know what it’s like to claw your way up from nothing. To watch people like you sit in chairs like this one and look down on people like me. To smile and nod and pretend I belonged while inside I was screaming.”