Forty-eight hours. That was how long I gave myself to build the case.
Not because I needed forty-eight hours. I could have done it in thirty-six. But I hadn't slept properly in four days and Lila had texted me seventeen times since the will reading and at some point a person has to eat something that isn't coffee and quiet fury.
I cleared my kitchen table, relocated my houseplant to the windowsill with an apology it didn't accept, and spread everything out.
The birth certificate came first. Marcus Vale's signature at the bottom, bold and unhesitating, the same signature on every Vale Group document I'd ever seen photographed in the press. He signed my birth certificate the same way he signed acquisition deals. Full commitment. No tremor. Whatever else my father was, he never did anything halfway.
Next, the DNA results. Notarized, verified, processed by a laboratory that had absolutely no reason to lie because I had paid them an obscene amount of money specifically to tell me the truth and nothing else. The results were four pages long and the relevant number was on page one: 99.97% probability of paternity. I had highlighted it in yellow. Then I had highlighted it again in orange because apparently I felt strongly about it.
Then the letters.
He had written to me for a decade. Not often. Not warmly, in the way normal fathers are warm. But consistently. Every few months a letter would arrive, typed not handwritten because his handwriting was genuinely terrible and he knew it, and the letters were always about the company, about decisions he had made and why. They read less like correspondence and more like a man explaining himself to a jury.
I had kept every one. Filed chronologically. In a box under my bed that I hadn't opened in two years because opening it felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit.
I opened it now.
And then, at the very bottom of the box, wrapped in a piece of cloth, was the photograph.
The two of us. I was maybe four years old, sitting on his shoulders, both of us laughing at something outside the frame. He looked younger than any official photograph I had seen of him. Softer. Like a man who hadn't yet decided to become the version of himself the world would eventually write about.
I sat with that photograph longer than I planned to.
Then I put it in the folder with everything else, closed the folder, and called Lila.
It was three in the morning.
She picked up on the second ring, which told me she had been awake and waiting, which told me she knew me better than most people know themselves.
"Tell me you've slept," she said, before I could speak.
Seven words. There was a pause on the other end, the specific kind of pause Lila does when she is arranging her feelings into an order she can speak out loud without either of us ending up crying.
"Lucien Cross's office," she said.
"Yes."
"Without an appointment."
"Obviously without an appointment, Lila. He's not going to give me one."
Another pause. I heard her sit up in bed, heard the soft sound of her lamp clicking on, and I knew she was now fully upright and gesturing even though I couldn't see her because Lila Moreno is constitutionally incapable of having a serious conversation lying down.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. What's the plan."
"I walk in. I put the folder on his desk. I give him two choices and approximately three minutes to make one."
"And if he throws you out?"
"He won't."
"You sound very confident for someone who was just escorted from a building by a security guard this afternoon."
"That security guard was very polite and I thanked him sincerely."
"Amara."
"He won't throw me out," I said. "He's too smart for that. If he throws me out he creates a scene and a scene is the last thing he wants right now. He'll see me. He might even pretend he doesn't know why I'm there." I paused. "He knows exactly why I'm there."
Lila was quiet for a moment. Then, very seriously, she said, "Don't let him see you shake."
"I don't shake."
"Everyone shakes," she said. "You just shake on the inside where no one can see it. Which is somehow more exhausting." She paused. "Wear black. Nothing else in that room except the folder. Just you and the evidence."
I looked at my wardrobe from across the room.
"Already planning on black," I said.
She exhaled. "Good. Call me the second you come out."
"I will."
"And Amara." Her voice softened in the specific way it does when she is about to say something she has been holding back. "He erased you in front of a room full of people and not one of them said a word. You are allowed to be angry about that."
I looked at the folder on my kitchen table. At the photograph inside it. At the man's signature on my birth certificate, bold and unhesitating, the signature of a man who never did anything halfway, who decided that the one halfway thing he would do was love me from a careful, managed distance.
"I know," I said. "I'll be angry later. Right now I have work to do."
I slept four hours. I showered. I stood in front of my wardrobe and chose the black dress that said I am not here to be looked at, I am here to be taken seriously, which is a very specific dress and it has never once failed me.
I took the folder. Nothing else.
The Cross Empire tower was forty-two floors of glass and steel in the heart of the city, designed to make you feel small before you even walked through the door. I walked through the door.
The lobby was all marble and low lighting and the sort of silence that money buys specifically to intimidate people. A receptionist sat behind a desk the size of a small country, blonde, immaculate, with the politely impenetrable expression of someone trained to deflect.
She looked up when I approached. Took me in. Took in the black dress, the single folder, the complete absence of a coat or bag or anything that said I was here for anything other than exactly what I was here for.
"Good morning," she said, in the tone that means please have an appointment. "How can I help you?"
"I'm here to see Lucien Cross," I said.
"Do you have an appointment?"
"I don't."
She smiled the smile. The one that means no. "I'm afraid Mr. Cross is unavailable this morning. If you'd like to leave your details I can have his assistant"
I leaned forward. Rested one hand lightly on the edge of her very large desk. Looked at her with complete, calm pleasantness.
"Tell him," I said, "that the daughter who doesn't exist would like five minutes."
She blinked. Once.
I straightened, smoothed the front of my dress, and waited.
Because here was the thing about Lucien Cross I had already understood from watching him sign paperwork in a hospital corridor the day my father died.
He was the kind of man who needed to know exactly what was coming toward him.
And right now, I was coming toward him.
The receptionist picked up her phone.