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Chapter 541
Chapter 541:
She glanced at the screen. The caller ID read: Mrs. Lynch.
Her heart lurched.
Since leaving the Compton estate, the head housekeeper had never once called her personal number — certainly not this early. It could only mean something had gone very wrong.
June grabbed the phone and answered.
“Mrs. Lynch p>
“Mrs. Erickson!” The housekeeper’s voice came through the speaker in broken, panicked fragments, barely held together between sobs. “Please, you have to come back! The old madam — she had a massive heart attack! The doctors only just managed to resuscitate her p>
𝗟a𝗍es𝘵 𝖼𝗁𝖺𝘱𝘁e𝘳𝘴 𝗈n
Every drop of color left June’s face.
Her hand trembled. She set her espresso cup down on the counter so hard that dark liquid splashed over the rim and bled into the white marble.
“What happened?” June demanded, her voice tight and controlled despite the fear rising beneath it. “Eleanor has a twenty-four-hour medical team monitoring her. How did this happen p>
Mrs. Lynch’s sobs hardened into something low and furious.
“It was the newspaper,” she said. “The New York Post. They ran a front-page story this morning p>
The housekeeper explained it quickly. The paper had published high-resolution photographs of Alycia sitting in a puddle of dirty water outside the Compton building, screaming about a miscarriage. The headline framed the Compton family as heartless monsters who had thrown a pregnant woman into the street. The article cited sources close to the Beasley family and included a tearful phone interview with Susan Beasley, apparently recorded just before her arrest. It was a calculated, surgical attack on the family’s reputation.
“The madam saw the paper at the breakfast table,” Mrs. Lynch said, her voice breaking again. “She cares about the family name more than her own life. She started shaking, and then she simply collapsed p>
June gripped the edge of the counter. Her knuckles went white.
“She woke up ten minutes ago,” Mrs. Lynch pressed. “She won’t let the doctors treat her. She refuses to see Mr. Cole. She just keeps whispering your name. Please, Mrs. Erickson. Please p>
June ended the call. The phone felt like lead in her hand.
She stared at the kitchen wall, her mind a battlefield.
She had sworn to herself she would never set foot inside that estate again — never walk back into the suffocating orbit of Cole and his family’s endless wreckage. She had meant it with every part of herself.
But Eleanor was different. When Cole had treated June as though she were invisible, Eleanor had been the one person in that enormous house who quietly sat beside her and offered a cup of tea. Eleanor had tried to protect her, in her own careful, limited way.
Easton stepped forward. His voice was measured and precise — the voice of a lawyer doing his job.
“June,” he said. “Do not go back there. The moment you walk through that door, Cole will use it as leverage to pull you back into his life. This is a trap p>