Chapter 4

Damian was across the room in an instant, his hand closing on the laptop — too late. The feed had been live. Twenty, thirty thousand viewers, and growing. He closed the screen anyway, by sheer reflex, and turned to the cameras.

"This footage is digitally manipulated," he said, with absolute authority. "We are currently working with our legal team to—"

But the room was already chaotic, reporters talking over one another, phones raised, someone near the back calling out questions that no one was answering. Damian leaned close to Lily and said something into her ear that she did not process, because she was still looking at the door.

Then his security team flanked her, and she was walked out of the press conference, into a waiting car, and driven directly to the Whitmore Private Psychiatric Clinic.

She didn't resist. She had known this was coming from the moment she hit play. She had planned for it.

She sat in the back seat and watched London pass the windows and thought about her son's face.

I'm still here, she told him silently. This isn't over.

By the following morning, the narrative had shifted.

Damian's PR firm was very good at its job. Within eighteen hours of the press conference, the story trending across social media was no longer about a dead infant and a footage clip — it was about Lily's "well-documented history of postpartum psychosis," her "erratic behavior," her "documented episodes of delusion and violent outbursts." Anonymous sources. Medical consultants willing to speak on background. A carefully placed article in a broadsheet that Damian's family trust had a financial relationship with.

People who had been sharing the clip were now sharing apologies. Someone started a Reddit thread titled Why I feel terrible for initially believing Lily Blackwood. The coverage pivoted to a sympathetic profile of Celeste — her grief, her bravery, her quiet strength.

Lily watched none of this. She was otherwise occupied.

The first treatment was administered on the second day. Electroconvulsive therapy, they called it — a clinical term for something that felt, in the seconds before she lost consciousness, like the inside of her skull catching fire. She came back to herself in a recovery room with a headache that sat behind her eyes like something solid.

On the third day, she was moved to a shared ward. The other patients were in various states of distress. She had not slept properly in forty hours. Someone threw a tray at the wall at three in the morning, and the staff took longer than they should have to respond.

By the seventh day, she had lost a significant amount of weight and there was a permanent low-level ringing in her ears. She sat in the chair by the window and looked at the car park below and felt very little of anything.

She was in this state — hollow, exhausted, stripped entirely clean — when the door to her room opened and Damian came in.

Celeste was with him. She was wearing a cream wool coat and pearl earrings and looked, Lily observed without particular feeling, extremely well. The pregnancy was visible now. Four months, perhaps five.

Damian set a file on the table in front of Lily. She looked at it but didn't move.

"Celeste is expecting a child," he said. "My child."

Lily already knew. She'd known since the press conference, from certain things Damian had said in the car, from the way Celeste had held herself at the wedding. She'd known before she'd walked into that room.

"I want the child registered under your name," he said. "Formally adopted. It will be legally straightforward — you are still my wife, and the child—"

"One condition," Lily said.

He stopped.

She looked up at him. Seven days. Seven days of ECT and sedatives and a ward that smelled of institutional cleaning products and other people's fear. Seven days of Damian's name being the last thing that stood between her and any kind of life.

"Give me my son's ashes," she said. "That's all I want. His ashes."

Damian was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded, once.

Lily looked back out the window.

"Then we have an agreement."

They held a small private memorial for her son in the Blackwood Manor chapel. Lily sat in the front pew and looked at the photograph they'd placed beside the urn — a hospital photo taken at three hours old, before any of this had begun — and felt the grief move through her, vast and wordless, like weather.

Afterwards, Damian brought out the family ledger. It was an old book, leather-bound, the names of four generations of Blackwoods written in formal script. He set it on the library table and opened it to the page with her son's name — the space they'd allocated after his birth, before everything fell apart.

With deliberate, careful movements, he crossed out her son's name and wrote another: Thomas Blackwood. Celeste's child's name. The ink was very dark.

Lily sat and watched it happen and did not look away.