The Iron-Tongued Lawyer Reborn: The Lost Heiress of House Sterling

The final straw came on a Friday afternoon.

I returned to my room and found my grandmother’s antique watch — a treasured family heirloom always kept in the locked display cabinet on the ground floor — sitting neatly in my dressing table drawer.

Less than ten minutes later, Margaret stormed into my room with the housekeeper, her face flushed with fury.

“Did you steal your grandmother’s watch?” she shouted, not waiting for an explanation.

“Sophia already told us — she saw you lingering near the display cabinet this morning!”

I looked at the watch, then remembered: that morning, while I was still eating breakfast downstairs, the maid who had cared for Sophia since childhood had stopped by my room under the pretext of changing the bedsheets — something that had never happened before, since my room was always made up in the evening.

Only she could come and go from my room without anyone noticing, and only Sophia knew the code to the display cabinet, since it held items “reserved for the Sterling young lady,” which she had had full access to for twenty years.

I understood at once this was a trap thrown together in haste, but not nearly clever enough to fool someone who had once stood before hundreds of fabricated cases.

But I didn’t argue anymore.

“If you don’t trust me even this much,” I said, my voice strangely calm, “then there’s nothing left for me to say.”

“No matter what I say, you’ll call it a lie anyway.”

“If you never meant to believe me, never meant to accept me — then why did you bring me home at all? To soothe the unease everyone in this house was feeling?”

“Fine, then. I’ll leave now — as if I’d never set foot in this house at all.”

“And who are you threatening?” Margaret sneered.

“Where do you think you’ll go? You don’t have a penny, no career, no one who knows you except the name Sterling — which you’re still not fit to carry.”

I smiled — the first smile I’d allowed myself since waking up in this body.

“Then I won’t carry it anymore.”

That night I left the Belgravia estate with nothing but a small suitcase — no money, no title, only my notebook and the memory of twenty years practicing law in another life.

The old butler, Mr. Higgins, quietly pressed a small envelope into my hand before I stepped through the gate.

“This is three months of my wages, miss. I don’t believe you’re who they think you are.”

That was the first time since waking in this body that I felt my eyes sting.

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