Chapter 1
Three years.
That's how long I'd practiced breathing through the pain. Three years of waking up and remembering my daughter wasn't in the next room. Three years of learning to live with the fact that another woman was raising Elodie.
I told myself I was prepared for anything.
I wasn't.
The Mercer estate blazed with wedding lights. Crystal chandeliers, white roses everywhere, the ocean crashing against the cliffs below. Everyone looked perfect. Everyone acted perfect.
And then I saw her.
Elodie.
Four years old now, her hair in tight ringlets, wearing a flower girl dress that looked too scratchy for comfort. She stood in the corner, watching everything with wide, careful eyes.
My heart stopped.
I'd spent three years imagining this moment. I'd rehearsed what I'd say, how I'd stand, how I wouldn't cry. None of it mattered now.
She didn't run to me. She didn't even look at me like she knew me.
Instead, she watched the adults around her like they were bombs that could go off any second.
A waiter bumped a table. A glass of water tipped over and spilled across the white tablecloth.
Elodie flinched.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
She hadn't done anything wrong. She hadn't been anywhere near that glass. But she apologized anyway. Softly. Quickly. Like she was afraid of what would happen if she didn't.
That was the first thing that terrified me.
The second was when I knelt down and asked her why she'd said sorry.
She looked at me with those big, careful eyes.
"Mommy gets sad when things go wrong," she said. "So I try not to make things go wrong."
Mommy.
She wasn't talking about me.
She meant Celestine. The beautiful blonde woman across the room, laughing like she didn't have a care in the world. The woman who'd stepped into my life and taken my place. The woman who knew how to braid Elodie's hair, which shoes gave her blisters, what story calmed her nightmares.
I'd imagined hating Celestine. I'd pictured screaming at her, demanding answers, making her pay.
What I wasn't prepared for was seeing the tenderness between them. The way Elodie leaned into Celestine's touch. The way Celestine's smile softened when she looked at my daughter.
It made me sick. And it made me wonder.
Then I saw it.
The bracelet on Elodie's wrist.
Three days earlier, an envelope had arrived at my apartment with no return address. Inside was a photograph. Elodie, asleep in her bed. Someone had stood close enough to reach out and touch her. Close enough to photograph the bracelet on her wrist.
The same bracelet I was looking at now.
That picture was why I'd driven twelve hours across the country. That picture was why I'd crashed this wedding.
I didn't demand my daughter back. Not yet.
I walked up to Celestine, my hands shaking.
"Celestine," I said.
She turned. Her smile froze.
"Maren," she said. "What are you doing here?"
"Let me see her wrist," I said.
Just that. One simple request.
For the first time all afternoon, Celestine looked afraid. Real fear. The kind that makes your eyes go wide and your breath catch.
She grabbed Elodie's hand. Hard.
"Come on, sweetie," she said, her voice too bright. "Let's get some fresh air."
She hurried away from the wedding guests, down the old stone path that led toward the coastal cliffs.
I followed.
Not ten feet from the main lawn, I saw it.
Elodie's flower girl bracelet. Lying in the grass.
I picked it up.
There was blood on the inside. Dried, brown, unmistakable.
The same kind of mark the doctors told me three years ago existed only in my imagination. The same kind of mark I'd lost everything trying to prove was real.
I closed my hand around the bracelet. The metal bit into my palm.
I looked toward the cliffs.
May you like
Whatever had forced me out of my daughter's life three years ago had started again.
And this time, I wasn't walking away.
