Chapter 4 - Bianca Had Reinvented Herself Before She Met Me
Bianca’s full name back then had been Bianca Sterling-Ross.
After the failed business, she married briefly.
Moved to California.
Divorced.
Stopped using Ross.
Built a career in luxury event consulting.
By the time I met her at a charity dinner, twelve years had passed since the scandal.
Natalie had been dead for eighteen months.
Lila was still a baby.
Bianca introduced herself as if our lives had never crossed.
That was the part I could not understand.
She knew exactly who I was.
My surname.
My daughter.
My late wife’s photographs in my house.
Yet she said nothing.
When we began dating, I told Bianca about Natalie early.
She listened sympathetically.
Asked questions.
Once she even said:
“I wish I could have met her.”
Now that sentence felt obscene.
She had met Natalie hundreds of times.
She had known her laugh.
Her temper.
Her ambitions.
Her generosity.
Her weaknesses.
Bianca had watched me grieve a woman she once called her closest friend—
and turned herself into a stranger so I would let her into the space Natalie left behind.
The pendant proved the lie.
But it did not yet explain why discovering it made Bianca violent enough to attack a toddler.
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For that, I needed to know what else Natalie had left behind.
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