Zahara's POV

The knock came at midnight…three sharp knocks that shook something loose in my chest before I even opened the door.

I did not move right away. I just stood in the hallway of my small apartment, my hand hovering near the light switch...listening to my daughter Cherry's soft breathing; through the cracked door of the twins' room.

Edward, her brother, mumbled something in his sleep and turned over...The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen behind me. It had been the only steady sound in my apartment that had never once in five years been visited by anyone from my old life.

It had been five years of silence from my father. And now...a fist is landing against my door in the middle of the night.

I opened it to find a man I did not know. Gray suit. Gloved hands...and a leather folder pressed to his chest like it held something sacred.

"Miss Lawson," he called me, and my own name in his mouth felt like a slap. Nobody had called me Lawson in five years.

Here, in this life I had built with my own two hands, I was only Zahara Smith, but on my busiest days I'm simply…Doctor Smith. The name Lawson belonged to a girl I had buried a long time ago...and hearing it now, felt like watching her climb out of the ground.

"Wrong door," I said, and was about to close it.

But his foot caught the frame, polite but immovable. "Your father sent me. Dave Lawson." He said the name like it alone can push the door wide open.

"He needs you at home tonight, if possible…Tomorrow at the latest."

I laughed, but it came out thin and cracked. "My father exiled me. He does not get to summon me back with a stranger at my door."

"The company is dying, Miss Lawson." His voice dropped low, but careful, like he was handling something fragile.

"Lawson Pharmaceuticals will collapse within the month if nothing changes and creditors are already circling. But your father found a way to save it….A marriage."

The word landed too heavy for my small hallway. Too heavy for the quiet life I had scraped together brick by brick without anyone's help and I felt my pulse climb into my throat.

"A marriage," I repeated through a closed-lipped smile...as if saying it slower would make it make more sense. "To who?"

"That will be explained when you arrive. Your father asks that you come with an open mind." He was careful with his words, I realized, just to give away what he had been told to give. "

For a moment I was not standing in my doorway anymore. My mind went back to when I was seventeen again, sitting at a long dinner table while my father announced my engagement to Thomas Zack, my childhood sweetheart. He held my hand under the tablecloth like a promise.

I let myself believe, for the first time in years…that somebody actually wanted me. Then, four days before the wedding...my grandmother fell down the east staircase of the Lawson estate, and by morning the whole house had decided I pushed her.

Nobody asked if it was true...Nobody asked why I would want to hurt the one woman in that house who had ever shown me any gentleness.

My father only needed a reason to get rid of the daughter his second wife despised...and Susan gave him one before I could even open my mouth to defend myself.