The boardroom was bright with the morning sun, its long glass windows casting sharp lines across the polished mahogany table. Lila sat at one end, alone for the moment, a stack of dusty files open before her. The documents smelled faintly of age, but she turned the pages carefully, her eyes scanning every line, every signature.
Father hid something here. I know it.
The door clicked open.
"Lila."
The voice was warm, honeyed, and deceptively gentle. Lila lifted her gaze slowly. Mrs. Amara Brown glided into the room, dressed in muted silk, her smile perfectly shaped but cold beneath the surface.
"mother." Lila's tone was polite, but cool.
Amara moved closer, her heels silent on the marble. "I must say, I was… surprised to hear of your visit. You've avoided this company for years, and suddenly—here you are, sitting at the table your father built." She gestured gracefully toward the files. "What changed?"
Lila closed the folder in front of her, her expression unreadable. "I thought it was time."
"Time?" Amara's smile widened just enough to be unnerving. "Time to claim an empire you once scorned?"
Lila met her gaze steadily. "Time to understand it."
For a moment, silence stretched between them, as taut as a drawn bow. The sunlight glinted across Amara's eyes, revealing the steel hidden beneath their softness.
"You know," Amara said finally, circling the table like a cat, "your father worked tirelessly to keep this company alive. It was his pride, his legacy. But it is also… delicate. One wrong move could undo everything he built. Are you sure you're ready to bear that weight?"
Lila tilted her head, studying her mother as though dissecting each word. "I didn't come here to be lectured on responsibility. I came here to look."
Amara paused mid-step. "To look? For what, child?"
"That," Lila replied smoothly, "is for me to know."
The air grew colder. Amara's smile remained fixed, but her fingers curled slightly against the table's edge. She leaned closer, her perfume sharp and heady.
"Well then," she whispered, her voice dripping with false affection, "I do hope you find what you're looking for. Just remember… not every secret in this company belongs to you."
Lila's lips curved into the faintest smile. "And not every secret belongs to you either, mother."
The silence that followed was thick with unspoken war. Two women, bound by the same name yet divided by suspicion, staring across the same table like rivals who knew the battle had only just begun.
Outside, the city hummed with life, unaware that within the walls of Brown & Co., a quiet storm was gathering.
The office smelled faintly of old paper and leather, a lingering echo of Mr. Brown's presence. Dust motes floated lazily in the sunlight filtering through half-drawn blinds. Lila stood before her father's massive oak desk, her fingers running over the carved edges as if the wood itself might whisper secrets.
She had been searching for hours. Contracts, ledgers, old minutes of meetings—nothing told her what she truly needed to know. Nothing explained why her father's final words had urged her to "look closer."
Frustration edged her movements. She opened the bottom drawer sharply, tugging at a stack of folders. One slipped, spilling across the floor. As she bent to gather them, something thin and fragile slid free from between the papers.
A photograph.
Lila froze.
The picture showed her younger self and her sister, Arie, perhaps no older than five and two . They were laughing, their arms looped around the waist of a woman neither of them had seen in years—dark-haired, warm-eyed, her smile radiant with unmistakable love.
Not Amara.
Her heart pounded as she traced the woman's face with trembling fingers. The resemblance was undeniable—the curve of the jaw, the depth of the eyes. A mother's eyes. Their real mother.
Lila sank into the chair behind the desk, the photograph burning in her hand. Why would Father hide this? Why let Amara raise us as though she were ours, when this woman… when she…
Her throat tightened. Memories she had buried stirred: faint flashes of a lullaby, the scent of jasmine, a gentle hand stroking her hair. She had convinced herself those fragments were dreams. Now she knew otherwise.
Arie had to see this. But more than that—she needed proof.
The next day, Lila walked into a private clinic, the photograph folded safely inside her purse. She handed over a sealed envelope containing strands of her hair, and another sample she had discreetly taken from Amara's hairbrush back at the mansion.
"I need a full maternal DNA comparison," she instructed, her voice calm though her hands were cold.
The technician nodded without question.
When the results arrived days later, Lila sat alone in her car, the envelope trembling in her grip. She ripped it open, her eyes scanning the words, each one slashing deeper into the fragile truth she had clung to.
Result: No biological relationship detected between Mrs. Amara Brown and Miss Lila Brown.
Her breath caught. The room spun around her. The lie was no longer just suspicion—it was fact.
Amara was not her mother.
The photograph lay on the seat beside her, the woman's smile almost mocking in its tenderness. Questions roared in her head. Who was she? Why had her existence been buried? And how much had Amara known?
Lila's grip tightened on the results. One thing was certain: this secret was powerful enough to shatter everything Amara had built—and Lila intended to use it.