Chapter 1 - Don’t Drop the Plates
“Drop those plates, and your mother loses her medication.”
Vanessa whispered it with a smile.
Across the dining room, ten guests were waiting to eat. Blood was sliding down my back beneath my torn uniform, and the woman who had put me through a glass cabinet was adjusting the diamonds at her throat.
“Please,” I said. “I can’t feel my fingers.”
“Then you’d better move.”
I lifted the twelve porcelain plates.
My name is Hannah Miller. I was twenty-nine, my rent was overdue, and I had seventy-eight dollars left until payday. My mother’s heart medication cost more than that.
Vanessa knew every one of those things.
She watched me cross the marble floor.
At the head of the table sat Luca Moretti, thirty-five, handsome enough to make people forget what his family did for a living.
Dark hair. Black suit. A face that rarely gave anything away.
An elegant matte-black wheelchair.
Three years earlier, a car accident had left both his legs paralyzed. People lowered their voices when they mentioned it, as if the injury had damaged his hearing, too.
I took another step.
The cut across my shoulder blade pulled open.
The top plate shifted.
I tried to catch it.
Porcelain struck Luca’s chest and lap. The rest shattered around his wheels.
“Oh my God!” Vanessa jumped up. “You clumsy little idiot!”
I dropped to one knee.
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m so sorry.”
“Leave them.”
Luca wasn’t looking at the broken china.
He was looking at my shoulder.
“Hannah. Turn around.”
“Please, I can clean this—”
“Who hurt you?”
“She fell against a cabinet,” Vanessa said.
He turned his chair toward her.
“I asked Hannah.”
The room went quiet enough for me to hear the grandfather clock in the hall.
Vanessa stared at me.
I thought about my mother dividing pills to make them last.
Then I thought about Vanessa shutting the dressing-room door while I stood bleeding outside it.
“She pushed me.”
Luca’s jaw tightened.
“Call the doctor,” he told the guard by the door.
Vanessa laughed once, too loudly.
“She was snooping through my personal things.”
“What things?” Luca asked.
My hand went into my apron.
At 3:42 that afternoon, I had found a photograph beneath Vanessa’s jewelry box. Under it had been a marriage certificate.
She had taken the certificate.
She hadn’t found the photograph.
I put it in Luca’s hand.
Vanessa outside a courthouse.
Michael Dawson beside her.
Luca’s oldest friend. His best man.
On the back, beneath a date from two years earlier, someone had written four words.
Our wedding day.
Luca looked across the table.
“Michael. Is this your wife?”
Michael lowered his champagne glass.
Vanessa’s lips parted.
“Luca, let me—”
“She didn’t marry me for love,” Michael said.
May you like
His hands were shaking.
“She married me because I know who caused your accident.”
