Chapter 1

The smell of burning gas filled my head, a phantom scent from a life I' d just violently ended.

Then, a baby' s cry, sharp and real.

My eyes snapped open, not to the blackness of death, but to the dingy floral wallpaper of my mother-in-law Karen' s living room.

Disbelief.

I was alive.

But how?

The last thing I remembered was the hiss of the oven, the sweet, cloying scent of gas, and a cold satisfaction as I took them all with me.

My baby, Lily, was gone, murdered by Karen' s idiotic, penny-pinching cruelty.

Her husband, Mike, my husband, stood by and let it happen, then blamed me.

His father, Frank, backed them both.

So I made them pay.

A memory, vivid and searing, flooded me.

Lily, my tiny Lily, her skin yellowed with jaundice.

The doctors were clear, phototherapy, sunlight.

"Expensive nonsense," Karen had scoffed, her voice like nails on a chalkboard.

She stripped Lily bare, placed her under a blazing hot utility lamp in the unheated living room, a cold autumn wind rattling the windows.

"Light is light," she' d declared, scrolling through her phone.

Lily' s condition only got worse.

After the hospital, the doctors prescribed Bio-Kult, a specific probiotic powder, vital for her fragile gut.

I was exhausted, asleep.

Karen found her chance.

She had a pesticide, "Bora-Kill," a borate-based powder for garden pests.

She kept it in the pantry, a testament to her dangerous hoarding.

"Powder is powder," she must have thought, or maybe the similar name, Bio-Kult, Bora-Kill, appealed to her twisted sense of thrift.

Or maybe it was just pure malice.

She swapped them.

Lily died.

A tiny, innocent life, extinguished.

Mike, my weak, spineless husband, told me, "Mom didn't mean it, Sarah, you have to understand."

Frank, gruff and entitled, said, "You should have watched her closer."

They framed it as an accident, a tragic mistake.

My grief turned to a rage so pure it burned everything away.

The gas, their screams, then silence.

And now, this.

The same floral wallpaper.

The same chill in the air.

The same, piercing cry of a baby.

My baby?