PART 1: The Ghosts on the Screen
“And now,” the host’s voice trembled with genuine excitement, “the Grand Prize for the most outstanding minds of this year’s tournament, achieving a perfect, unblemished score never before seen in our history: Congratulations to the twin sisters… Chloe Hartwell and Sophie Hartwell!”
The auditorium erupted, but all I could hear was my own blood rushing. Two teenage girls stepped out of the illuminated row, and the giant LED screens instantly threw their faces up in hyper-crisp detail.
I stopped breathing.
I was looking at ghosts. The high, aristocratic bridge of the nose. The sharp, angular jawline. They were perfect, living molds of me at thirteen years old. But their eyes, dark, profound, and terrifyingly calm, belonged entirely to Marianne, the woman I had ruthlessly abandoned thirteen years ago while she was pregnant.
“Hartwell,” the host repeated. Her maiden name.
“What is this?” Cordelia, my billionaire wife, shrieked, leaping to her feet and shattering the decorum. “This is a mistake! Where is Penelope’s name?”
At that moment, the screen flashed the lowest-tier consolation list. The name of Penelope, her daughter, propped up entirely by my money, sat dead last at the bottom.
“This is rigged!” Cordelia screamed, slamming her hands against the velvet railing. “I paid top dollar! How does my daughter lose to two fatherless nobodies?!”
Crushed by the sheer weight of the truth, I stared at Cordelia’s distorted, ugly face, then back at the stage, where my flesh and blood stood like conquering queens. The brilliance I had thrown away to buy this gilded cage was suffocating me.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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