The priest asked the child’s father to step forward, and my husband walked toward the altar while my cousin stood beside him holding the baby

The revelation left a bitter taste in my mouth, but the ledger held more than just a destination. Beneath the Harrington transaction was a signature authorizing the release of medical documentation from my original fertility clinic.

It was not Ethan's handwriting.

It was signed in elegant, sloping cursive: *Evelyn Vance.*

My aunt. My mother’s younger sister, the woman who had helped raise me after my parents passed away in a car crash twelve years ago. The woman who had wept with me in the hospital room when the doctor told me I would never carry to term.

"No," I whispered, stepping back from the desk, clutching the leather book against my chest. "Not Aunt Evelyn. She couldn't have."

"Claire, Evelyn was the executor of your mother’s estate," Julian said, his voice laced with caution. "She had full power of attorney over your medical records during your recovery from that accident five years ago. If anyone could authorize an embryo transfer without raising red flags at the clinic, it was her."

Without another word, I grabbed my coat. "Call Uncle Richard. Tell him to meet us at the family estate in Oakridge. Now."

The drive to Oakridge took forty minutes under the pelting rain. When our SUV pulled into the gravel driveway of the ancestral manor, the front porch lights were on. Inside, Aunt Evelyn sat near the marble fireplace, sipping tea from fine china, wrapped in a cashmere shawl. She looked completely undisturbed, as if the scandal at the christening earlier that evening had happened on another planet.

When I pushed the double doors open, Oliver sleeping securely in the portable carrier held by Julian behind me, Evelyn looked up with a serene smile.

"Claire, darling. You brought the boy home. Thank heaven. Ethan was always too reckless for his own good. I told him making a scene at the church was foolish."

"You knew," I said, walking toward her, my voice trembling with suppressed fury. "You knew Oliver wasn't Bella’s baby. You knew all along."

Evelyn set her teacup down on the saucer with a delicate clink. "Of course I knew. Ethan needed an heir to secure his seat on the board. You were fragile, Claire. You were obsessed with carrying a child yourself, falling apart after every failed cycle. Ethan came up with a practical solution."

"A practical solution?" I shouted, my restraint finally snapping. I hurled the black ledger onto the glass coffee table between us, shattering a crystal vase. "And selling my daughter to the Harrington family for two and a half million dollars—was that a practical solution too, Aunt Evelyn?!"