shield. I looked at Eleanor, whose face was a mask of aristocratic disgust.
“You’re right, Eleanor,” I whispered, my voice carrying clearly through the damp air. “I have nothing.”
I turned my back on the massive, imposing facade of the Washington estate. I didn’t look back as I walked down the long, winding driveway in the rain, leaving my ruined clothes in the mud, not letting them see my final, solitary tear.
Chapter 2: The Royal Facade
Six months passed.
To the Washington family, and to the elite social circles they aggressively courted, Audrey Washington was a ghost. They assumed I had faded into obscurity, crawling back to whatever cramped, working-class apartment I had come from before Terrence, the heir to the massive Washington Shipping Empire, had supposedly lost his mind and married a pediatric nurse.
They continued to live exactly as they always had. They threw lavish parties, bought
