For two days, I slept. The deep, dreamless sleep of the utterly exhausted. The constant, gnawing fear of a threat at the door receded.
I began to think, to plan, not just react.
Then the final rock was hurled.
It was a bright Tuesday morning. My new secure phone rang. It was Jessica, my publicist. Her voice was tight, controlled, but I could hear the panic beneath.
Amelia, sit down. I just got a call from Chad Wy at the National Inquisitor.
My blood ran cold.
The Inquisitor was the bottom feeder of tabloids, famous for alien autopsies and celebrity sex tapes.
He says he’s been contacted by a reliable source. He strongly implied it was Tristan through Slovic. They’re preparing a story, a massive, career-ending expose. He’s offering us a right of reply, but it’s a shakedown. He wants our side to make it juicier, or he’ll run with what he has.
What does he have?
My mouth was dry.
He says he has proof of your long-term affair with Alex Rost. He claims to have evidence of financial malfeasance at Ether Tech that you and your father covered up. And, Jessica took a shaky breath, he says he has a source who will testify that you have a history of mental instability, that you were hospitalized in college for a breakdown, that this entire thing is a vindictive campaign driven by a pathological need for control, and that you’re an unfit mother.
The world dropped out from under me.
The first two allegations were lies, easily disproven with time. But the last one, it was a twisted, malignant seed of truth.
I had been hospitalized sophomore year at Yale, not for a breakdown, for severe pneumonia that turned into sepsis. I’d been in the ICU for a week.
It was a physical illness, but the records could be muddied, the narrative twisted.
Unfit mother.
The two most devastating words in the English language, weaponized.
Jessica, I said, my voice miraculously steady, tell Chad Wy to print whatever he wants. We have no comment.
Amelia, if they run with this—
Let them, I said, a cold, clear fury finally crystallizing inside me, burning away the last of the fear.
Tristan had just shown me his final card. It was a lie wrapped in a half-truth, designed to be the most damaging thing he could think of. He wasn’t fighting for money or even for Liam anymore. He was fighting to erase me, to destroy me so completely that no one would ever believe a word I said.
I ended the call and walked to the window of the estate’s library, looking out over the manicured grounds, the high walls, the armed guards at the gate.
He thought he was throwing rocks at a glass house. He didn’t realize he was throwing them at a fortress.
And I was done just standing behind the walls.
I picked up the phone and called Ben.
He’s playing his hand. He’s going to the Inquisitor with a story about an affair, corporate fraud, and my mental health.
Ben was silent for a long moment.
The bastard, he finally breathed. Okay, this is the gutter. This is where we expected him to go. We have the paternity test results, conclusive, of course. We have all of Alex Rost’s sworn affidavit and travel records. We have your full medical records from Yale. We can bury him in facts. But once the story hits, even if we debunk it, the stain—
I don’t want to just debunk it, Ben, I said, my voice like ice. I want to annihilate it. And I know how. Get me everything you have on Mark Slovic. Not the professional stuff, the dirt. And get me everything your investigators have found on S. It’s time we stop playing defense. He wants to talk about secrets. Let’s talk about his.
I hung up, my heart pounding not with fear, but with a cold, focused anticipation.
Tristan had stared into the abyss of his own ruin and decided to try and pull me in with him.
Fine.
He’d just made a fatal mistake. He’d shown me the depth of the hole he was in. And now I was going to give him the final push.
The National Inquisitor article hit the internet on a Thursday morning, and for a few hours the digital world held its breath.
The headline was exactly the gutter-level masterpiece I’d expected.
Ares Hell: Inside Amelia Sinclair’s Secret Affair, Corporate Cover-Ups, Mental Meltdown.
The byline was Chad Wy.
Tristan, through his lawyer Slovic, had sold his story, and the Inquisitor had paid in the currency he now desperately needed: attention.
Ben, Jessica, and I were gathered in the secure study of the Greenwich estate, monitoring the real-time analytics on a large screen. My father, Robert, was on speakerphone from Switzerland.
The piece is live, Jessica announced, her voice tense. They’re leading with the affair with Alex Rostston. They have the grainy video stills. They quote an anonymous close friend of Blackwood’s saying the marriage was a sham for public consumption and that you were emotionally distant and obsessed with work. Then they pivot to the financial irregularities at Ether, vague allegations of shifted funds hinted at with no concrete proof. And then the medical records, or rather their twisted version of them.
She took a deep breath.
They claim to have documents showing you were involuntarily committed to the psychiatric ward at Yale-New Haven Hospital for a severe psychotic episode following a romantic rejection. They have a source close to the family saying you’ve been on a cocktail of mood stabilizers for years and that your current behavior is a manic, vindictive spiral that puts your infant son at risk. They end by questioning your fitness for custody and the stability of Ether Tech leadership.
Family
The room was silent except for the hum of the computers.
I felt a strange detachment. Seeing the lies printed, given the weight of a news story, was less painful than I had feared. It was so over-the-top, so maliciously crafted that it almost felt fictional.
The comments, my father’s voice crackled over the speaker.
Flooding in, Jessica said, her eyes scanning another monitor. The usual Inquisitor crowd is eating it up. Knew she was crazy. Daddy’s money can’t buy sanity.
But look at the shares and the other outlets.
She pulled up a different dashboard.
