Chapter 13 - The Sister Sophie Never Told Ethan About
Not biological sisters.
Something more complicated.
When Anna was sixteen, she ran away from an abusive foster placement.
Sophie was volunteering at a youth shelter.
Twenty-one.
She found Anna sleeping behind the building.
Bought her food.
Helped her enter a safer placement.
Stayed in contact.
Anna called Sophie her sister.
Sophie never told Ethan because Anna’s history was private.
Then Sophie became sick.
Anna visited her secretly.
Rebecca showed Ethan a photograph.
Sophie bald from chemotherapy.
Anna beside her.
Both smiling.
Ethan had taken Sophie to treatment that same week.
He had never known.
It hurt.
But not because Sophie betrayed him.
Because he realized how much of someone’s life can remain invisible even inside love.
Before Sophie died, she told Anna about Embryo 6.
Not every detail.
Only that her father had created something without consent and she wanted it destroyed.
Years later Margaret found Anna.
She told her the embryo still existed.
Anna was furious.
Then made an unexpected decision.
She would carry it.
Why preserve something Sophie wanted destroyed?
Because Anna learned the embryo was genetically Sophie’s.
She believed destroying it would erase the last biological part of the woman who saved her.
A morally complicated choice.
Not necessarily right.
But hers.
Rebecca opposed it.
Eventually accepted it.
Then Lily was born.
Anna changed.
She wanted the truth documented.
She planned to expose Malcolm’s clinic posthumously and protect Lily from Reed trustees.
Melissa Grant—the former technician—agreed to testify.
Anna and Melissa drove together to meet a federal investigator.
They never arrived.
Their brakes failed.
Rebecca had planned to join them.
She did not.
Someone sent her a message telling her the meeting location changed.
A trap.
After the crash, Rebecca realized whoever caused it might come for her.
Marianne Sloan approached.
Offered help.
Provided false identity papers.
Rebecca believed Marianne was protecting her.
For four years she lived as Rachel Moore.
Then she discovered Marianne had lied.
Marianne knew about the crash before it happened.
“How?”
Rebecca produced Anna’s old phone.
A recovered message from Marianne:
Don't drive tonight. M says the car has been handled.
Timestamp:
two hours before the crash.
Marianne knew.
But who was M?
She claimed Margaret.
Margaret denied it in her diary.
Malcolm was dead.
Maria had no involvement.
Then Rebecca found another message.
M:
Once Anna signs, the child belongs to the trust. If she refuses, make sure she never reaches the investigator.
This was no longer ambiguity.
Someone had threatened Anna before her death.
Police examined the account.
It had been accessed from a Reed Foundation office.
Only three people had credentials.
Marianne.
Malcolm’s former CFO.
And Victoria Reed.
Ethan’s stomach sank.
Victoria had claimed she only learned about Anna after the embryo transfer.
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Server records proved she was accessing messages about Anna before Lily was born.
Victoria had lied.
