Chapter 32 - The Midnight Strategy
By 3:00 AM, our living room looked like a war room. Five high-profile family law attorneys, three corporate defense litigators, and Ethan’s private intelligence unit sat around the glass conference table, surrounded by piles of financial audits and decades-old medical logs.
Noah sat beside me on the sofa, his face stoic, holding his laptop. "Mom, I ran a deep digital audit on the surrogacy filing Vivian presented to the sheriff."
Ethan walked over, setting a cup of warm tea in front of me, his jaw set in a hard, rigid line. "What did you find, Noah?"
"The notarized signature from ten years ago isn't fake," Noah said, pointing to the high-resolution scan on his laptop screen. "The digital timestamp matches the exact date and hour you walked out of the Vance corporate gala into the rain, Mom. But the clinic registration code belongs to a private facility in Geneva that was owned by the Harrington family."
"Victoria Harrington," Ethan muttered, his blue eyes flashing with lethal realization. "Julian’s ex-fiancée. Before Julian was arrested, he transferred his remaining offshore trusts to Vivian."
"It's a coordinated legal trap," our lead attorney, Sarah Vance-Ellis, explained, placing a stack of legal precedents on the table. "Under Illinois family law, if a notarized surrogacy contract exists prior to birth—even if obtained under duress—the surrogate mother has no automatic parental rights unless she can prove fraudulent consent within a ten-year statute of limitations."
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"The statute of limitations," I whispered, my blood turning to ice. "When does the ten years expire?"
Sarah looked down at her watch, her expression grim. "In seventy-two hours. On Noah and Sophie’s tenth birthday."
