Chapter 1 - THE DEAD WOMAN AT THE WEDDING
My sister was standing at the altar when I walked into her wedding and said, “Before you marry her, you should know she murdered me.”
The string quartet stopped.
Three hundred guests turned toward the ballroom doors.
I stood there barefoot, wearing a torn hospital gown beneath an oversized trench coat. Bandages covered half my face and both hands. Five years of scars pulled tight across my neck whenever I breathed.
Juliette Mercer stared at me from beneath a crystal chandelier.
Her white satin dress had cost more than most people made in a year. Around her throat rested our mother’s emerald necklace—the one Mom had promised to me before she died.
Juliette’s champagne slipped from her hand.
“Get that filth out of here!” she screamed.
Not Who are you?
Not How did you get in?
She recognized me.
Two security guards started forward, but my father stopped them.
Douglas Mercer had spent his life controlling boardrooms without raising his voice. Now his face looked gray.
“What’s going on?” Juliette’s fiancé, Nathan Cole, demanded.
I stepped onto the marble floor.
Pain shot through my left leg. I kept walking.
Five years earlier, the world had been told that Caroline Mercer died in a fire at the family’s lake house. A death certificate had been issued. My accounts had been emptied. My shares in Mercer Development had passed to Juliette.
But I had not died.
I had woken in a private clinic under the name Jane Miller, drugged, burned, and unable to remember how I got there.
Detective Marcus Vance entered behind me carrying a leather briefcase.
He had lost his badge after refusing to close my case. He had also spent three years finding me.
Marcus set the briefcase on the wedding table and opened it.
He removed my hospital wristband, photographs of my scars, and the death certificate bearing my name.
Across the certificate, in black ink, he had stamped one word:
FORGED.
My father picked it up with shaking hands.
“This has Juliette’s signature.”
Juliette’s expression hardened. “It’s fake.”
Marcus placed an estate-transfer form beside it.
“It moved Caroline’s thirty-two percent ownership in Mercer Development to you six days after the fire.”
Nathan stepped away from his bride.
I stopped in front of Juliette and slowly removed the bandages from my face.
Gasps moved through the room.
The left side of my jaw was badly scarred, but the right side was untouched.
My father whispered, “Caroline?”
“Yes, Dad.”
He began to cry.
Juliette backed into the altar.
I leaned close enough to smell her perfume.
“You stole my inheritance,” I said. “You stole five years of my life.”
“You can’t prove anything.”
Marcus reached into the briefcase again.
This time, he pulled out a small digital recorder.
“I was hoping you’d say that,” he told her.
He pressed Play.
A man’s frightened voice filled the ballroom.
“Juliette Mercer told me to burn the lake house with Caroline inside.”
The guests erupted.
Juliette stared at the recorder.
Then she looked at me and smiled.
May you like
“You should’ve stayed dead.”
Before anyone could stop her, she grabbed a steak knife from the wedding table and lunged at my throat.
