WITH A SCOWL ON HER FACE and her heels aggressively clicking against the marble tiles of her father's home, Debbie pushed the heavy wooden doors open that led to Arthur's home office.

"We need to talk", the woman spat the words at her father, the man not even looking up from the stack of papers on his table, which led Debbie to snap her fingers in front of his face. "Dad!"

"What is it, Deborah?", Arthur asked with a sigh as he slowly lifted his gaze, clearly annoyed at his daughter's sharp tone. "What is it this time?"

The relationship between the two had not always been easy, both too stubborn and greedy to be able to have a loving father-daughter relationship. Power was all that mattered to Arthur O'Connell, and while he was proud that at least one of his daughters was just like him, this sometimes led to heated arguments.

Nevertheless, Debbie was a large and important part of his law firm, after all she followed in his footsteps and was supposed to take over the family business later. Deep down, Arthur had always hoped that both of his children would share his company one day.

You could think what you wanted of the greedy man, but it was important to Arthur that his daughters were financially secure and didn't have to worry about their future. Unfortunately, in Arthur's eyes, Josy had once again sold herself short after her accident when she started working in a burger restaurant.

"Josy's still not back." Debbie planted her palms on the glass surface of the desk, her cold eyes piercing into her father's. "Summer still claims she knows nothing, which is bullshit and we both know it. Where do you think she is, huh?"

Arthur let out another sigh as he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his expensive, dark blue suit. "Well, none of us have to be a genius to put two and two together, right?"

"Why are you so fuckin' calm?" Debbie huffed in disbelief, pushing herself up. One hand on her hip, she rubbed her chin thoughtfully with the other, her gaze fixed at the floor-to-ceiling windows and onto the beach. "Do you think she'll believe them?"

"Because, Deborah, I know they can't prove shit", Arthur said with a certain arrogance, his chin dipping upwards as he raised an eyebrow. "I hope you can handle the pressure and keep your mouth shut."

Debbie's head snapped to the side so quickly that her golden brown hair flew through the air. "Are you telling me you don't trust me?"

"That's not what I said." With a shake of his head, Arthur stood up and strolled with a certain authority and elegance across the marble tiles, the small heel of his dress shoes clicking softly against the expensive flooring until he came to a stop in front of the young woman.

When she looked away with yet another huff, the man just gripped her chin and forced her to look at him with the gentle pressure of his fingers. He was used to his eldest daughter's dramas, so this wasn't anything new to him. "You know very well that I trust you, but you seem a little too nervous for me."

"Because we'll go to prison and lose everything you, everything we've, built", the brunette hissed at her father. "And I'm not ready for that, Dad!"

"Could you trust me for once, Debs?", he asked, his blue eyes holding a certain urgency. "There is absolutely no evidence. Nothing's going to happen."

"I trust you, you know that. In fact, you are the only one I trust." Debbie's features softened when her father called her by her nickname, a sigh falling from her lips as she let her arms fall to her side from their crossed position. "I know that all the evidence has been destroyed, but she can get examined, which Josy will surely do when they tell her about the baby."

"Josy gave birth a year and a half ago, or rather had a C-section, and since several cuts had to be made in that area, the C-section scar could just as well have been one of those random cuts", Arthur said, still completely calm, a smile on his lips that seemed rather forced. "We told her exactly that, so why should she question it?"

"I was at the hospital, Dad, I saw the baby", the brunette explained through gritted teeth. "It had a head full of red hair, which the girl probably still has. Josy's gonna want to know if she's the mom, you know her!"

"You were at the hospital to make sure the doctor kept his mouth shut after you ran over your sister." Arthur's voice grew colder as he took a step closer to Debbie. "You had one job, Deborah, one damn jobᅳ to put Josy out of her misery, not to make it worse."

"Don't you think I don't know that?!" As she often did in one of her tantrums, Debbie shoved her father in the chest and turned away from him like an offended child. She stared out the window again, watching the waves crash against the sand. "It wasn't planned for her to survive, but apparently she has more fighting spirit than we expected. It was as if her body didn't want to give up."

"And now, however, she has been swept back into the arms of the dirty bikers." Arthur moved forward with elegant strides until he stood next to Debbie at the window. "And if she believes them, we have lost her again."

Debbie didn't answer that, instead she tilted her head to the side, a humorless laugh leaving her throat. "Can you believe we actually tried to kill her? Are we the real monsters here?"

"It would have been best for Josy." Arthur's face said nothing, but the twitch in his jaw only happened when he felt a spark of guiltᅳ or anger. "Maybe we are, but her husband was much worse and took our innocent Josy away from us. But we both know that she would never have left him."

"And that was his mistake. Without him, Josy would've never cut us out of her life", Debbie snorted disparagingly, a pain ripping through her chest. "But what hurts the most is that she actually chose him over us. A life with a biker who would probably beat her up one day and cheat on her all the time, instead of a life with us, in luxury and with a reasonable choice of men."

"You know very well that Josy was never like us", Arthur sighed, a hint of disappointment swimming in his eyes. "We just wanted to free her, that's all. With the child, she would only have been tied to Happy for life."

Debbie grimaced, knowing how callous and absurd it all soundedᅳ and she knew that no one, and least of all Josy, would understand what they had done, why they had done it. So the older O'Connell sister ignored how macabre it sounded that they had actually tried to kill Josy just because they thought they could spare the youngest O'Connell a life of danger and pain.

"Unfortunately, the child survived and now has to live with a father like Happy." Arthur glanced at his daughter. "It was pure luck that Josy lost her memory, we were lucky. And not every doctor would've been as easily bribed as Dr. Gaylan back then."

"What would we have done if Josy hadn't lost her memory?" Debbie asked with some curiosity. "While I was already bribing the doctor after he told me that Josy made it, we didn't even know if she would lose all her memory."

Debbie could still clearly remember that day, sneaking into the hospital unnoticed after the accident, and waiting right outside the surgery room to intercept the doctor who was in charge of delivering the good news while Josy was being prepared to be moved to the recovery room.

As her father said, they were really lucky that the doctor was apparently in a personal emergency situation and needed every dollar he could getᅳ otherwise their plan would've never worked.

With her acting skills that she needed as a lawyer and a batting of her eyelashes, Debbie had finally managed to persuade the doctor with a fairly large amount of money. Unbeknownst to the other doctors who had help with the surgery, Dr. Gaylan had claimed that he would personally take care of Josy, whereupon he gave the Sons the horrible news that Josy had died and then had to come up with something when no other than Happy Lowman wanted to see his dead wife.

Debbie still didn't know how the doctor had managed to make Josy look like she was actually dead, with no pulse and allᅳ and she didn't care. The woman also made sure that the doctor remembered to destroy any evidence that Josy was ever pregnant. For example, a pill to stop the flow of milk and a few drastic changes change in the medical records.

What mattered was that Josy was here with them and Debbie had to make sure it stayed that way. If only to save her own ass.

Arthur's jaw twitched again, much more than before, before he uttered the next words. "We would've taken her home against her will and finished what we started."

Debbie stood still, her arms crossed over her chest again as her father rushed past her and stormed out of the room. As soon as the doors slammed shut, Debbie released the breath she had been holding in her lungs.

What they had done back then was wrong and as cold as both O'Connell's usually were, they felt guilty deep down. Guilty of actually trying to kill Josy and her then unborn baby, guilty of taking away what Josy loved more than anything elseᅳ and all because their egos were too big to accept that Josy only wanted to have them in her life if they had accepted Happy.

But that was something neither Arthur nor Debbie could've ever done. To accept scum like the Sons were in their eyes.

ᅳ

WITH A TIRED SIGH, Josy let her head fall onto the soft pillow after taking a long shower before finally crawling into bed. Her red hair was thrown into a messy bun on top of her head, just like Esmee's in the photo that Josy was holding in her hand.

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she ran the side of her index finger over the picture, unable to take her eyes off it. Before she left Charming this morning to drive back to Roseville, they had had a DNA test done at a doctor's office so that Josy could be really sure that Esmee was her daughter.

The redhead had no doubts, that wasn't the problem. The moment she saw the girl for the first time, she knew immediately that this was her daughter, she had felt it in her bones.

However, if she wanted to have solid proof, she needed a piece of paper that said in black and white that Esmee was her daughter, that she had given birth to a child a year and a half ago. Happy had also promised her that he would make sure Juice would hack into St. Thomas' system again.

Happy. Another smile danced across her pale face. She couldn't get the man with the slim but muscular figure, the many tattoos and the deep, raspy voice out of her head, her heart still beating faster when she thought about how his strong arms had pulled her against his chest, how warm his breath had felt against her skin, how intensely his brown eyes had looked into hers.

It was a shame that she couldn't remember anything. There were two photo albums in her bag, one of which she had received from Gemma, the other from Happy. Maybe pictures from different events would jog her memories.

She really hoped so.

If the younger O'Connell sister was honest, she would love to go back, make sure to save her marriage, get to know the man who had supposedly been her true love again. She wanted to give them a chance to find each other again, no matter how intimidating the thought of it was.

What if her feelings wouldn't come back? That was her greatest fear. But if she was honest with herself, when he held her, she had felt comfortable around someone for the first time since her accident. That had to be a good sign.

But for now Josy had to stay here, play naive and pretend to believe her father and sister and tell them a lie, smear honey around their mouths. That was the only way she could look for evidence in peace and secretly keep in touch with Happy.

Just as she put the picture of Esmee on her organized nightstand and was about to close her eyes to get some sleep after the long drive, there was a knock on her door, eliciting a groan from her.

Lacking motivation, Josy peeled herself out of the beige, patterned blanket and shuffled to the door, rolling her eyes as she saw her father through the peephole. Great.

"Hey dad, a little late, isn't it?", she said with a perfect plastic smile after she had opened the door. Stepping aside with her arms crossed over her chest, the young woman stepped aside. "Come in."

So the show could begin.

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