Chapter 1

The party was for my son.

His one-month celebration, held at the Vance family' s sprawling Napa estate.

My father-in-law, David, kept handing me glasses of wine.

"Drink up, Ethan. You' re a father now. You' ve earned it."

His smile never reached his eyes. I was an outsider, a project manager from San Francisco who had married his daughter, Chloe. I knew he resented me. His father, the patriarch Arthur Vance, liked me more than him. He saw me as a successor, not his own weak-willed son.

I drank. More than I should have. The world blurred, and then it went black.

I woke up with a pounding headache. The sun was streaming through the window. I went to my son' s crib.

Inside was a baby girl.

I stared, my heart hammering against my ribs. I checked again. A girl. Not my son.

I ran downstairs. Chloe, David, and my mother-in-law, Maria, were in the kitchen, drinking coffee. They looked calm.

"Where is he?" I demanded. "Where' s my son?"

Chloe gave me a confused, pitying look.

"Honey, what are you talking about? Our daughter is upstairs, sleeping."

"Daughter?" The word felt like poison in my mouth. "We have a son. I held him yesterday."

David scoffed. "Still drunk, Ethan? We' ve always had a daughter. You were so happy."

Maria chimed in, her voice sharp. "Are you one of those men, Ethan? Disappointed you didn' t get a boy? To reject your own child like this... it' s shameful."

They were gaslighting me. All three of them. A coordinated attack.

Panic seized me. I ran back upstairs, they followed close behind. The baby girl was awake, gurgling in the crib.

"He has a birthmark," I said, my voice shaking. "On his shoulder. A small brown mark."

I reached into the crib, my hand trembling as I tried to turn the baby over. My fingers brushed against her cheek.

Her reaction was immediate and violent.

Her skin erupted in red welts. Her breathing became a ragged, horrifying gasp. Her tiny body convulsed.

Chloe screamed. A raw, piercing sound of pure horror.

"What did you do? You killed her! You murdered our daughter!"

The world spun out of control. The story leaked. The media painted me as a monster, a misogynist who killed his infant daughter because he wanted a son.

Arthur, my powerful grandfather-in-law, was told I was unstable, a disgrace. He didn' t intervene.

The trial was a blur. My family' s testimony, the media frenzy, the public hatred. It was swift.

The verdict was death.

As the lethal injection entered my veins, the cold spread through my body. My last thought was one of utter confusion. I still didn' t understand what had happened.

Then, I jolted awake.

My heart was a jackhammer in my chest. I was on the couch in the master bedroom of the Vance estate. The party music was still faintly audible downstairs.

The memory of the needle, the cold, the confusion-it was all terrifyingly real.

It was happening again.