Chapter 1

My end came quietly, a draining of warmth, a fading of light.

One moment I was Eleanor Vance, alive, sketching a new diorama.

The next, I was a whisper, a cold draft in my own home.

She stood over my empty shell, Isabelle Thorne.

Her eyes, not my eyes, glittered with a cruel triumph.

She had stepped from the pages of that old book Julian studied, that gothic romance.

"Finally," Isabelle breathed, her voice a silken mockery of mine, "a proper vessel."

My body, now just a thing, lay on the floor.

Isabelle touched her new face, my face, with a possessive curiosity.

She admired my hands, flexed my fingers.

Then, she dragged my remains, so light, so desiccated, out of the house.

I drifted behind her, a helpless shadow.

She took me to the old part of the town's cemetery, a place forgotten by most.

A shadowy figure waited there, a spectral groundskeeper, her famulus from the novel.

"Bury it deep," Isabelle commanded, her voice sharp, no longer trying to sound like me. "No trace."

The groundskeeper nodded, its form flickering.

It began to dig.

I watched my life being erased, my body hidden.

Isabelle Thorne was now Ellie Vance.

And I, the real Ellie, was nothing but a ghost, a horrified witness to my own stolen life.

She wanted my husband, Julian.

She believed he was the key to her becoming truly real, to anchoring her in this world.

The manuscript he cared for, the one his family had passed down, was her prison and her escape route.

Now, she thought she had won.