“Ms. Emma Hayes?” a calm male voice asked. “My name is David Lin. I’m an attorney with Lin & McCallister. I’m sorry to reach you under these circumstances, but I have some news regarding your great-uncle, Charles Whitmore.”
My mind blanked. Charles Whitmore? I hadn’t seen him since I was thirteen. He’d been the family’s black sheep—or maybe I was. After my parents’ deaths, contact with the Whitmores dissolved like salt in rain.
“I’m afraid he passed away last week,” the lawyer continued. “But… he named you as his sole heir.”
I froze. “I—I think you have the wrong person.”
He chuckled softly. “No mistake, Ms. Hayes. Mr. Whitmore left you his estate—everything. Including Whitmore Industries.”
I blinked. “The Whitmore Industries? The energy conglomerate?”
“The same,” he confirmed. “You’re now the majority owner of a multi-billion-dollar corporation. There is, however, one condition…”
His words hung in the air, heavy and electric.
As I stared at my reflection in the courthouse window—the thrift-store dress, the weary eyes, the faint outline of a woman everyone had written off—I realized my life wasn’t ending.
It was just beginning.