The Fall from Grace
Three days later, the world learned the full story.
Victoria was arrested at the front gates of the Vance Estate while trying to leave in a hired car. She wore a simple black dress and no jewelry. Paparazzi swarmed the iron gates like vultures. Cameras flashed. Reporters shouted questions that sliced through the morning air.
“Victoria! Did you really lock a seven-year-old in the dark?”
“Did you kill Arthur Vance’s first wife?”
“How much money did you steal?”
She kept her head down. For once, she had no performance left to give.
In the back of the police cruiser, she watched the grand gates of the estate grow smaller in the rearview mirror. The place she had fought so hard to enter was now spitting her out like poison.
At the precinct, she was processed like any other criminal. Fingerprints. Mugshot. Orange jumpsuit. When they took her photograph, she did not smile. She simply stared straight ahead, eyes empty.
That night, alone in a holding cell, Victoria curled on the thin mattress and cried for the first time since she was a child. Not because she had been caught. But because, in the end, she had become exactly the kind of person she had always despised — someone who destroyed children to protect her own lies.
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She thought of Julian’s terrified face behind the glass door. She thought of Arthur’s cold, dead eyes when he looked at her for the last time.
And for the first time in her life, Victoria Sterling felt truly, completely alone.
