“Hello?” the gruff voice answered. “Dad,” I whispered, my voice breaking. “I need you.” Arthur Sterling doesn’t do things by halves. Within three hours, a private medical helicopter landed at the rural hospital. By nightfall, I was in a secure, private suite in the city’s best hospital, surrounded by my father’s personal security team.

Sitting by my hospital bed, my father listened as I sobbed and told him everything. I expected him to be furious with me for cutting him out, but instead, his face turned to stone. Arthur’s private investigators went to work immediately. By the next morning, we had the whole picture.

Victor had taken out a $50 million life insurance policy on me through a shell company six months ago. The underwriter? A subsidiary of Sterling Insurance. And the perfume I had been smelling? It belonged to his mistress, a woman he had been seeing for a year, who was already packed and ready to move into my house.

“He thinks he’s filed the claim,” my father said, his voice dangerously calm as he looked at a tablet. “He’s fast-tracking a memorial service at St. Jude’s Cathedral for this Friday so he can get the death certificate processed.” “I want to be there,” I said, my voice hardening.

The fear was gone. All that was left was a burning, white-hot rage. “I want to see his face.” Three days later, Victor held my funeral. The cathedral was packed with our friends, his coworkers, and his family. I sat in a tinted black SUV outside, watching through a tablet linked to a hidden camera my father’s team had placed inside.

Victor stood at the podium, looking impeccably handsome in a dark suit. He dabbed at his eyes with a handkerchief, delivering a heartbreaking eulogy about how much he loved me, how he wished he could have saved me when I slipped on the ice. Sitting in the front row, openly weeping, was his mistress.

When he stepped down, he sat next to her, their shoulders touching. I saw him smirk. He leaned over to his brother and sneered, “They both froze to death. That useless woman deserved it.” He thought he was a genius. He thought he was fifty million dollars richer and free.

The SUV door opened. My father offered me his arm. I was wearing a black mourning dress that tightly hugged my nine-month-pregnant belly. I had a faint bruise on my cheek from the fall, but otherwise, I looked exactly like the ghost of the woman Victor had just buried.

We walked up the stone steps. My father nodded to his security guards, who grabbed the heavy iron handles of the cathedral doors.