I did not go to the kitchen. I stepped onto the club’s back terrace, and a minute later Nathaniel followed, his face pale beneath the string lights. “Forgive me,” he said. “You look exactly like someone I lost a very long time ago.” Then he told me about his younger sister, Eleanor, who had died twenty-seven years earlier in a car accident. She had a newborn daughter who disappeared afterward. The family had been told the baby had died too.

Nathaniel stared at me. “You have her eyes. Her exact face. And you’re twenty-seven years old.” Before I could process it, Warren and Beatrice appeared behind us, visibly terrified. Nathaniel asked whether I had any adoption documents. I remembered the sealed envelope I had found years earlier inside Warren’s study, hidden beneath a false compartment. It had my name on it, but I had never opened it. “I know where it is,” I whispered. Warren’s face immediately collapsed. We drove back to the estate that night with Nathaniel and his lawyer. I retrieved the envelope from Warren’s desk and finally opened it. Inside were my original birth records—and a name I had never been allowed to know.