Chapter 1

The hospice smelled of disinfectant and quiet despair. At sixty-six, I was a sack of brittle bones, my breath a shallow rasp in the sterile room. Forty years I' d worked, forty years of grease under my nails and a constant ache in my back, all for nothing.

My daughter, Stella, stood by the bed. She wouldn't meet my eyes. She never did.

"Dad," she said, her voice flat. "You have a visitor."

The door opened, and a woman walked in. She was older, but her clothes were expensive, her hair perfectly styled. Beside her stood a younger man, handsome and polished, his hand resting on her arm. A boy, maybe in his late teens, trailed behind them.

It was Jenny. My wife. The wife who had supposedly died in a fiery car crash forty years ago.

"Ethan," she said, her voice smooth, not a hint of the small-town girl I married. "It' s been a long time. I heard you weren' t well."

She looked me over, a flicker of something-pity, maybe disgust-in her eyes.

"I wanted to thank you, really. For raising Stella. She turned out so well. And for taking care of my parents all those years. It was very... noble of you."

Her new husband smiled, a tight, condescending expression.

Jenny opened her purse. "We' d like to help. Pay for a decent burial. It' s the least we can do."

The shock was a physical blow. The betrayal, so old and buried, ripped through me with the force of a fresh wound. My wife, alive. My daughter, in on the lie. My whole life, a joke. The flimsy monitor beside my bed started screaming, a high, frantic beep.

My heart seized. The world went dark.

Then, light.

I gasped, shooting upright. My heart hammered against my ribs, strong and steady. I wasn' t in a hospice. I was in my own bedroom, the one with the peeling wallpaper and the scent of stale coffee. My hands, they weren't the gnarled claws of an old man. They were strong, calloused, the hands of a 26-year-old mechanic.

In my right hand, I clutched a crumpled piece of paper.

I knew this paper. I had slept with it, cried over it, for months. It was Jenny' s suicide note, the one that arrived six months after she vanished.

"Ethan, I can' t do this anymore. The world is too much. Please take care of Stella and my parents. Don' t look for me. I love you."

Love. The word was poison.

I was back. I was 26 again. The betrayal hadn' t happened yet. Or rather, it was happening right now. Jenny was gone, but she wasn' t dead. She was in the city, building a new life with a new man, while I was here, playing the grieving widower and raising her daughter, supporting her parents.

Not this time.

This time, I would make her "death" real.