Chapter 1: The Inhumane Lawsuit
The courtroom smelled of floor wax, stale coffee, and the suffocating scent of old fear. It was a smell I had never associated with my husband, Liam, but now, three weeks after his funeral, it was the only thing I could smell. It clung to the back of my throat, bitter and unyielding, much like the woman sitting across the aisle from me.
“Your Honor,” Victoria Sterling‘s lawyer boomed, his voice echoing off the high mahogany walls of the superior court. He was a man named Mr. Thorne, wearing a suit that shimmered under the fluorescent lights, costing more than my entire college education. “My client has irrefutable evidence that Ms. Sophie represents a fraud of the highest order. We assert that she is, in fact, infertile. That belly she is parading around is nothing more than a prosthetic—a ‘Moonbump’—designed to elicit sympathy and steal the Sterling family fortune.”
A murmur rippled through the gallery. The sound was like the buzzing of flies around a carcass. I sat at the defendant’s table, my hands instinctively covering my stomach. I was twenty-four weeks pregnant. My back ached with a dull, throbbing rhythm, my ankles were swollen over the straps of my sensible shoes, and grief was a heavy stone sitting permanently in my chest.
Liam was gone. A drunk driver. A rainy Tuesday. A phone call that shattered my universe. And instead of mourning him, instead of curling up in his hoodies and smelling his scent one last time, I was here. I was fighting his mother for the right to exist.
