Chapter 1

The state trooper' s words hung in the stale air of my living room.

"I' m so sorry, Ms. Johns. There was a crash on the mountain road. A rental car... it went over the side. We believe your parents, Barney and Debra Jones, were inside. There were no survivors."

I stared at the peeling paint on the wall behind him, my mind a blank slate. He was saying more things, something about the fire, about identification, about how sorry he was for my loss.

I should have been crying. I should have been collapsing. Twenty years ago, in another life, I did. I screamed until my throat was raw and my world shattered into a million pieces.

That grief had been real, a heavy cloak I wore for two decades. I' d worked three jobs, my hands cracked and bleeding, to raise my baby sister, Stella. I' d saved every penny, a mountain of sacrifice that amounted to $50,000. I gave it all to her, my brilliant, sweet Stella, who turned it into a Wall Street fortune. She was my everything, the reason for my struggle.

The memory of her success party was burned into my soul. The glittering Manhattan penthouse, the clinking champagne glasses, the hollow ache of my own exhaustion next to her radiant success.

And then I saw them.

Barney and Debra. Alive. Not ghosts, but solid and smiling, dressed in clothes that cost more than my car. They were hugging a young man in a tailored suit, a man I didn't recognize but whose face held echoes of theirs.

"Wesley," my mother, Debra, had cooed, her voice dripping with a pride I had never heard directed at me. "My brilliant son."

The world had stopped turning. They explained it all with cruel, casual laughter. The baby swap at the hospital. Wesley was their true son, swapped with me, the daughter of some tech billionaire named Andrew Blakely. They faked their deaths, abandoning me with their real daughter, Stella, so they could follow Wesley, their golden ticket, to a life of luxury.

My entire life, my sacrifice, had been a lie. A tool they used.

Stella, my sister, the one I had raised, just stood there. She watched as I tried to process the monstrous betrayal.

"What about me?" I had whispered, my voice breaking.

Debra sneered. "You? You were just the help. Look at you, still smelling of grease and poverty." She waved a dismissive hand at the security guards. "Get this trash out of my son' s party."

Stella' s eyes were cold, empty. She didn't say a word as they dragged me away. She didn't flinch when they pushed me into a dark alley. She didn' t scream when the cold metal pressed against my head.

The last thing I saw was her turning back to the party.

Now, I was back. Back to the beginning of the nightmare. The trooper was still looking at me with pity. The baby was crying in the other room. Not Stella. I knew that now. The baby was Gabrielle, my real, biological sister, who the Joneses had also left behind.

A cold, hard knot formed in my stomach. It wasn't grief. It was rage.

"This time," I whispered to myself, the words a silent vow. "This time will be different."

I looked at the trooper, and for the first time, I let a single, calculated tear roll down my cheek.

"My parents... oh god, my parents..." I let out a choked sob, a perfect performance of a devastated orphan.