They Chose Their Adopted Daughter, So the Real Heiress Walked Out novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Orchard Lane

The house on Orchard Lane has twenty-two windows, and every one of them was lit.

I had not been inside since the morning of the crash.

I came in through the front door without knocking, and nobody stopped me.

My mother was waiting in the study with the lamp on.

She sat behind my grandfather's desk in a cream blazer, with her pearls on, and she did not stand up.

Clark leaned on the bookshelf. Eli stood by the window with his hands in his pockets.

My father sat in the leather chair in the corner.

He is a quiet man of fifty-eight who has said perhaps two hundred words to me in three years.

He lifted his hand and rubbed the skin behind his left ear.

He did that whenever the room got tense, and I had stopped noticing it a long time ago.

"Sit, Talia," my mother said.

"I'll stand."

"As you like." She slid a single sheet of paper across the desk. "Read it."

I picked it up.

It was one page, typed, with a line at the bottom for my signature.

It said that I had experienced a traumatic childhood and was showing signs of aggression. It said I agreed to counseling, and to live at home under my family's supervision.

At the bottom was the date, and my name already typed beneath the line.

"The video is everywhere," my mother said. "Four hundred thousand people have watched my daughter put three grown men on the ground. The board has asked questions."

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