Riley’s apartment perches over the town like it wants to be one of the mansions but ran out of money halfway up the hill.
The living room is really a square of floor with a couch, a thrift-store table, and a view straight down to the harbor. Tonight the boats below carry the last of the “Light the Harbor” decorations, strings of white and blue bulbs drooping from masts. Beyond them the peninsula narrows, and the Mercer estate glows on the cliff, glass and stone washed in warm light.
The heater clanks every few minutes, trying to keep up with the wind sliding off the water. The air inside smells like burnt coffee, cheap takeout, and the faint antiseptic tang drifting from the hospital on the hill. The sound of her laptop keys fills the room, hard little taps, followed by the sharp swish of the delete button.
“Read it again,” I say.
She does not look up. On the screen, a single line sits at the top of the document: I am Riley Mercer, née Shaw.
She stares at the words, jaw clenched, then hits backspace until they disappear.
“Too much,” she mutters. “Too… something.”
“Too true?” I ask.
She cuts me a look. “Too eager,” she says. “Too ‘hi Dad, remember the kid you lost in the couch cushions.’”
She rests her fingertips on the keys again, not pressing, just hovering. The screen’s light carves out the angles of her face, leaving the rest of the apartment in shadow.
“Try it again,” I say softly. “No one’s grading the drafts.”
She inhales, shoulders rising, and types the same sentence, letter by letter.
I am Riley Mercer, née Shaw.
The cursor blinks behind the period, a tiny metronome ticking out a future nobody asked for.
“There,” I say. “That’s the spine of it.”
“It’s a sentence,” she says. “Not a spine.”
“That sentence pulls on a trust big enough to buy three hospitals,” I answer. “It tells the Mercers you exist in writing. That’s more spine than most people get.”
Outside, wind rattles the windowpane. The harbor’s surface warps, reflecting the Mercer crest from a banner down by the docks into a broken smear of silver arcs. The same crest hangs everywhere in this town—on donor walls, on hospital brochures, even engraved on the silverware at the country club. The abstract wave pattern looks elegant until I remember how many lives it hides.
“What if I just start with the facts?” Riley asks. “Skip the whole name drama. ‘Dear Counsel, attached please find indisputable proof your client is my father.’”
I picture Evelyn hearing those words from one of her attorneys, face smooth, voice flat. I can almost feel the temperature drop at the estate.
“Your name is part of the facts,” I say. “The trust says ‘Second Daughter.’ The DNA says ‘Robert Mercer: parent.’ You writing ‘I am Riley Mercer’ ties those facts to a person who can sign on a dotted line.”
“You mean it makes me billable,” she says dryly.
“It makes you harder to pretend away,” I say.
She stares at the sentence again. Her knee bounces beneath the table, shaking the cups. The half-empty coffee in front of her sloshes against the sides, leaving brown rings on the chipped ceramic.
“Every file I’ve ever pulled on these people shows the same pattern,” she says. “Birth certificates adjusted, adoption papers sealed, death certificates edited. People disappear on paper first, then in real life. And here I am, doing the opposite. Writing myself onto their stationery.”
The lamp in the corner flickers, humming against the dim. I rub my thumb along a splinter in the edge of the table, grounding myself in the sting.
“You told me once that records are how the world decides who counts,” I say. “You deserve to count.”
She swallows and nods toward the laptop. “So. Dear Mercer Family Legal Team?”
“Use the firm’s actual name,” I say. “You want this to land on the partners’ desks, not in some junior associate’s junk folder.”
She smirks and clicks into the upper left corner, typing the date and the law firm’s header, neat and precise. I watch her type out the salutation, the law’s favorite disguises: To Counsel for the Mercer Family Trust,.
“I hate them already,” she mutters.
“Get in line,” I say.
Then she drops back to the opening line. Her fingers hesitate again.
“Say it,” I urge. “At least here, in this room.”
Her throat works. “I am Riley Mercer, née Shaw,” she reads out loud.
The words hang there, heavier than the steam drifting from the radiator.
I feel them settle in my chest too. Not because I want the Mercers to have another child, but because the world already took that choice away from her. She should feel the shape of her name in her own mouth before Evelyn tries to rip it out.
“Again,” I say.
Her eyes flicker toward mine, wary. I hold her gaze.
“I am Riley Mercer, née Shaw,” she repeats, a little firmer.
Something in her posture straightens, spine aligning, shoulders squaring. The sentence shifts from audition to declaration.
“Good,” I say quietly. “Now we build the rest.”
We spend the next half hour translating fury into legalese. Riley scrolls through a folder of notes—trust clauses she photographed, the DNA report uploaded into encrypted storage, timestamps from the hospital’s own records that she scraped from outdated databases.
“Reference the trust by full title,” I say. “Mercer Family Trust II. And the specific article number.”
“Article IV, Section 3,” she says, barely glancing at her notes. She types, the keys clacking:
I write to assert my status as the biological daughter of your client, Robert Henry Mercer, as confirmed by accredited DNA testing (Report ID: RM-2149A), and as contemplated in the instrument titled MERCER FAMILY TRUST II – SECOND DAUGHTER BENEFICIARY, Article IV, Section 3.
I read it over her shoulder. The language feels colder than the wind outside, but underneath it something dangerous beats.
“They’ll hate that,” I say. “You’re speaking their dialect.”
“Weaponizing their own paperwork against them,” she says. “Occupational hazard.”
She adds lines about preservation of records, instructing them not to destroy or alter any documents relating to her birth, adoption, or the trust. She mentions potential conflicts of interest between Evelyn’s role at the foundation and their handling of beneficiary information.
“Careful,” I warn. “Accusing them of misconduct in the first paragraph invites them to circle the wagons.”
“Inviting them to violate their ethical obligations invites me to call the bar association,” she shoots back. “They’re not the only ones who can draft threats.”
Her jaw tightens again, but this time the energy rides higher, not collapsing in on itself. She is not begging for acknowledgment here; she is planting a flag.
At around the four-hundred-word mark of the letter, she stops and flexes her fingers. “Talk to me about risk,” she says. “Worst-case if I send this tonight.”
I lean back, chair creaking, and picture Harbor Glen’s invisible wiring.
“Evelyn hears ‘biological daughter’ and ‘trust’ in the same sentence,” I say. “She calls the firm, the hospital board, the foundation. She calls Daniel. She calls the therapist. Everyone’s calendars fill up with ‘emergency meetings.’”
Riley cracks her knuckles. “Keep going.”
“You work in their backyard,” I say. “That hospital on the hill is their fortress. Judges golf at the country club they endow. Cops send their kids to schools with Mercer science labs. She’ll paint you as an extortionist swinging DNA around for cash, and me as the unstable daughter-in-law egging you on.”
“On the plus side, press would eat that up,” she says. “Ruin porn pays.”
“We don’t have a journalist lined up yet,” I remind her. “We have your lab report and a blurry photo of a trust page. That’s enough to rattle them, not enough to pin them.”
She taps the table with a nail, rapid-fire. “So we wait,” she says.
“We plan,” I answer. “Waiting alone is how people in this town disappear under donor walls.”
Her mouth twists, but she nods toward the screen. “What do you suggest, strategist?”
I think about the file Dr. Lang promised Evelyn, the elegant cruelty of a “concerned” therapist writing down every doubt about my perception. I think about the loose staircase runner, the skid marks on the guardrail, the boat parade where Evelyn turned Harbor Glen into her personal census.
“We treat this letter like a detonator,” I say. “We don’t press the button until we’ve wired enough charges that they can’t just defuse one and walk away.”
“And in the meantime?” she asks.
“We make sure they can’t bury you quietly,” I say. “Insurance.”
Her eyes narrow. “What kind of insurance?”
“You trust those time-release email systems you talked about?” I ask. “The ones that send automatically unless you cancel?”
She freezes, then slowly smiles. It is not a warm expression.
“Dead man’s switch,” she says. “Spoken like someone who has read too many true-crime threads.”
“Spoken like someone who lives in a house where accidents happen on schedule,” I say.
She spins the laptop around, opens a browser tab, and navigates to a minimalist site with a padlock logo. The interface is bare: fields for recipient, subject, message, schedule conditions.
“I use this for whistleblowers,” she says. “If they get scared and ghost me, their stories still land somewhere safe. Never thought I’d be the one wiring myself up.”
“Address it to the firm,” I say. “And to a copy of yourself, at a secure account. Maybe your agency. Anyone who will know what it means.”
“And you?” she asks.
I hesitate. One more thing Evelyn could use to argue I orchestrated this. One more line of ink between me and her son.
“Blind copy,” I say finally. “To an email she doesn’t know exists.”
Riley gives me an approving nod, like I passed a test I didn’t know she was giving. She types in the addresses, then pastes the letter text into the message field, making a few tweaks for email format.
“Schedule conditions,” she reads aloud from the screen. “Send automatically if not canceled within X days, or if no login detected within Y days.”
“Two weeks,” I say. “For now. Enough time to gather more without letting them get too far ahead if they catch wind of us.”
“And no-login trigger?” she asks.
“Set it shorter,” I say. “Five days. If you vanish for five days, I want something landing on a lawyer’s desk.”
Silence drops between us like a weight. The only sound is the whirr of the laptop fan and the faint bass thump from a car turning onto the back road below, bypassing the manicured town center.
“You know what you’re implying,” she says.
“I know what Evelyn implied when she talked about ‘treacherous roads’ and my ‘emotional state,’” I say. “I’d rather be dramatic and alive than polite and missing.”
Riley’s throat works again. She clicks the settings without arguing.
“All right,” she says. “Two weeks. Five days. Timer armed.”
The site confirms the schedule with a soft ping. A tiny countdown icon appears beside the draft, numbers ticking down in the corner of the screen.
“We could cancel it right now,” she says, voice low. “Walk away. Pretend we never opened that DNA report.”
“Do you want to?” I ask.
She looks past me, out the window. Down below, the country club’s dock glows in careful symmetry, every light a status symbol. Closer to us, the cheaper boats rock quietly, their bulbs mismatched and half-burned out.
“I grew up being the kid who didn’t get picked,” she says. “Families chose other kids, or kept the ones they had. If I don’t hit send, I stay that kid forever. The one they forgot in the paperwork.”
“They didn’t forget you,” I say. “They erased you.”
She turns back to the screen. The letter’s opening line still sits there in bold, a dare.
I am Riley Mercer, née Shaw.
She reaches out and, with exaggerated care, adds a final line at the bottom.
Respectfully,
Riley Mercer (born Riley Shaw)
When she finishes the name, she presses her fingertips flat over it, covering it.
“Feels wrong?” I ask.
“Feels like a door,” she says quietly. “Once I walk through, I can’t go back to pretending the hallway doesn’t exist.”
I slide my hand over hers, two palms pinning the name to the screen.
“We haven’t walked yet,” I say. “But we unlocked it. That matters.”
The heater kicks on again with a groan. A thin ribbon of steam curls from the radiator, carrying the faint metallic smell of old pipes. Far off, I hear a siren wind up, then fade in the direction of the hospital.
“So we wait,” Riley says. “We collect more. We talk to whoever drew up that trust. We get someone at the hospital to admit something on record.”
“We do all of that,” I say. “And if anything happens to either of us, this letter makes sure the Mercers do not get to choose how the story ends.”
She nods, eyes still on the countdown icon.
“Ticking mercy,” she says. “Or ticking bomb.”
“Depends who reads it first,” I answer.
We close the laptop, and the room falls into shadow, lit only by the harbor lights and the faint glow from the hospital crest on the hill. My phone feels heavy in my pocket, full of lab reports and trust photos and the new knowledge that my own origin story is built on switched names.
Somewhere above us, in the cliffside mansion that sits literally above the law, Evelyn Mercer is probably deciding which yacht to ride in next year’s parade and which threats to deploy this week. She has no idea a quiet email clock just started counting down below her.
The question that presses against my ribs as I stand to go is not whether we will gain enough evidence before the timer hits zero.
It is whether the Mercers will feel the tremor under their perfect peninsula in time—or only when the name they buried arrives in their inbox with a subject line they cannot ignore.