Chapter 1

“Maya! Maya, wake up. Please, I didn't mean to. I swear I didn't mean to…”

Hands were on my shoulders, shaking me so hard my teeth knocked together. The voice was high and wet with tears, and it was so familiar that my whole body went cold before my mind had time to catch up. I knew that voice. I had heard it in every bad dream for three years.

My eyes opened slowly.

The first thing I saw was a book. Its cracked leather spine was digging into my cheekbone, and the pages smelled of dust and lemon oil. Not bleach. Not the sour, boiled-rice smell that hung in the corridors of the institute. Lemon oil and old paper.

I lifted my head. Tall windows with heavy green curtains, a walnut desk, glass cabinets crowded with porcelain and jade and small bronze things that had probably outlived three dynasties. Mrs. Smith's study. We had come to the Smith house for dinner, and Mrs. Smith had told me, so kindly, that I could borrow anything I liked from her shelf of medical texts. I remembered slipping away between the soup and the fish. I must have fallen asleep over the book.

That was impossible, because I had died.

My phone buzzed against my hip. I dug it out with fingers that didn't feel like mine, and the screen lit up under my thumb. The date sat across the top in thin white numbers. 2023.

Three years ago.

The room tilted, and for one terrible second everything I had been holding away from myself came in at once.

I was standing at the top of my grandfather's driveway in a borrowed dress that didn't fit, my left leg dragging behind me the way it always did after the last beating, my right hand curled against my stomach because it could no longer close around anything. The gates had opened for me for the first time in three years. Grandpa had asked to see me on his birthday, and someone had finally decided it was time. A driver I didn't know had left me at the curb without a word.

Then a stranger's phone lit up beside me, and I saw my own face on it.

Not only my face. Pictures of me that I had never agreed to and had never seen, pictures taken while I was too broken to lift my head, spread across every corner of the internet by people who had never met me. The comments ran down the screen faster than I could read them. I only caught pieces. Shameless. Disgusting. Someone should finish her off. A woman near the gate covered her mouth and looked at me the way you look at something on the bottom of a shoe.

I remembered running, or what I called running. I remembered the road behind the estate, the cold rail, the wind pulling at that ugly borrowed dress. I remembered thinking that nobody would even look for me.

And then nothing.

“Maya!” The nails dug into my shoulder. “Are you listening to me? Say something!”

I turned my head.

Olivia Whitmore was kneeling next to my chair in a pale pink dress, her curls pinned neatly, her face red and shining with tears. Her mascara had held up beautifully. Even now. Even when she was frightened she cried in a way that made people want to hold her.

“Look,” she whispered, and pointed with a trembling finger.

The vase lay on the carpet in a dozen pieces. Blue and white porcelain, hand-painted cranes, the pieces still faintly rocking against each other as if it had only just happened. I had seen that vase in Mrs. Smith's cabinet an hour ago, on its own little velvet stand, and the housekeeper had told us all that it was the only thing Mrs. Smith had taken with her when she married, a piece from her grandfather's own hands.

“I only wanted to see it,” Olivia said, and a sob caught halfway up her throat. “I picked it up and it just slipped. It just slipped, Maya. You know I would never…”

I knew this scene.

I knew it so well that I could have finished her sentences. In the last life I had sat right here with the leather book still warm against my face, and I had listened to her cry, and I had felt sorry for her. That was the part I couldn't forgive myself for. I had felt sorry for her.

“The Smiths will ruin us,” she said. Her fingers found my wrist and closed. “Dad's contract, Ethan's shares, everything. If they find out it was me, I'm finished. Everyone will hate me. Maya, please. Just this once, tell them it was you. You're the strong one. They'll shout at you for a day and forget. Mom will make sure. I'll make it up to you, I promise, I'll tell everyone what you've done for this family…”

I said nothing.

I looked at her hand on my wrist. Long pink nails, a little chipped on the thumb, the fake pearl bracelet I had once been too polite to tell her was cheap. I looked at it for so long that she stopped talking.

“Maya?”

My throat was tight. I didn't trust it. If I opened my mouth, I didn't know which one of us would come out, the girl who used to say yes or the woman who had died on a road behind her grandfather's house. So I let my eyes fill up the way they used to and looked down at the carpet.

Olivia waited. I could feel her waiting. The room was so quiet that I heard the tick of a clock somewhere behind the cabinets.

“Why aren't you saying anything?” she said, and this time her voice changed. Something under the sweetness had gone hard. “Are you going to do it or not?”

I shook my head, only a little.

She let go of my wrist.

It was the smallest of moments, but I saw it. The way her face emptied out, all the lovely crying gone. Underneath it was a girl who had never once, in all the years she had known me, been told no.

“You ungrateful…”

Her hands hit my chest.

I hadn't stood up yet. The chair rocked and tipped, and I went over sideways with the book still in my lap and my palms flat against the carpet, right where the biggest pieces of the vase had settled. A shard of porcelain went through the meat of my left hand as if it had been waiting for me.

For a moment I felt nothing. Then it came, hot and sharp and bright, and a sound tore out of me that I hadn't chosen at all.

“Ah… ah… ow, it…”

I curled around my hands. Blood was already running down my wrist and into the cuff of my sleeve, thick and dark against the blue and white. The tears I hadn't wanted came all at once, and with them came the hiccups, the ugly kind that jerked my whole chest. I couldn't stop them. I pressed the back of my wrist to my mouth and they came out from behind it anyway, small and broken.

Olivia stood over me with her hands still raised, and for a second even she didn't know what she'd done.

“I didn't… you fell. You fell on your own.”

The door flew open.

There was no knock, no warning, only the heavy thud of wood against the wall. The woman I called Mom stepped through it in her champagne silk dress, the diamond earrings Dad had given her swinging. She had come to fetch us for dessert. I saw the exact moment she took in the room, the broken vase, the blood, Olivia standing, me on the floor.

“Maya?”

She was beside me before I could breathe. Her hands, cool and perfumed, took my wrists and turned them over, and I heard her draw a breath.

“Oh, my God. What happened to your hands?”

“Mom,” I whispered. The hiccup broke the word in half. “Mom, it hurts.”

“Mom, she fell,” Olivia said quickly. “I told her to be careful, but she wouldn't listen, she was crying about something, and she…”

“Ethan!” my mother called over her shoulder, and her voice cracked with a kind of panic I had never once heard in it when it was for me. “Ethan! Kelvin! Somebody come here!”

Heavy footsteps ran down the corridor. Ethan came first, tall and sharp in his dark suit, the business face he wore for clients still on. Kelvin was behind him with his sleeves already unbuttoned like a man who had been born to walk into emergencies, and Eric last, his hair still perfect from the last photoshoot, one hand on his phone.

“What's going on?”

“Her hands,” my mother said. “Look at her hands.”

Kelvin was down on one knee in a heartbeat. He took my hand from her, turned it under the lamp, and swore under his breath. “That's deep. Somebody get me a clean cloth. Maya, look at me. Look at me. Don't look at it.”

I looked at him. His eyes were wide, and his fingers were shaking a little where they held mine. In the last life those fingers had never once reached for me.

Ethan lifted me off the floor as easily as picking up a child. “We're going to the hospital. Now.”

“Ethan, wait,” Olivia said. The little crack was in her voice again, though her face had gone white. “Wait, she…”

He didn't turn around.

“Mom!” Olivia stamped her foot on the carpet, the way she used to when she was seven. It was the most useless sound in the world. “Mom, tell him! It was… it was Maya who broke the vase! She was the one who did it, not me! What am I supposed to do if she…”

“What did you say?”

It was Eric who said it. He had stopped in the doorway with his phone halfway to his pocket.

“I said it was Maya!” Olivia grabbed at his sleeve. “She's lying to you, she always does this. She made me come in here, and she picked up the vase, and then she…”

Ethan stopped.

I felt it through his arms, how the muscle went still. I kept my face against his shoulder and let the tears soak into his jacket. Slowly, one hand at a time, he set me down in the chair.

“Maya,” he said. “Look at me.”

I looked. His face had gone strange, drawn tight over the bones. Behind him, Eric had let his phone slide back into his pocket.

“Did you break Mrs. Smith's vase?”

I shook my head. “I didn't,” I whispered. The hiccup cut the word in half. “I didn't do it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry…”

“Sorry for what?” Eric said. “For lying?”

“Eric,” Kelvin said, low. He was still holding my wrist, still pressing the napkin against the cut, and his eyes went from Olivia to me and back again.

“She's apologizing, isn't she?” Olivia wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand. Her voice had steadied. “Why would she apologize if she didn't do it?”

That was the thing about Olivia. She could smell a door opening.

My mother's hand stayed on my shoulder, but her fingers had stopped moving. I felt her looking, not at me, but at the blood and the mess and whatever she was already calculating on the far side of it.

“Enough,” she said. “All of you. We are in someone else's house.”

Too late.

A man was standing in the doorway behind my brothers, tall, a glass of whisky in his hand and a face that was handsome in the way a locked door is. Mason Smith. His eyes moved over the room the way a bank teller counts money, The broken vase. The blood on the carpet then Olivia's hand still gripping Eric's sleeve before his eyes settled on me.

“Mr. Mason.” My mother recovered so fast it was almost impressive. She smoothed her dress, took a step, and put on a smile so bright it hurt to look at. “I am so sorry. There has been a little accident. One of my girls, you know how careless they can be, and I'm sure we can…”

Mason wasn't looking at her.

He was looking at the vase.

“That belonged to my mother,” he said, quite calmly. “My grandfather put it on her dowry list himself.”

Nobody breathed.

“Then someone here has a lot to explain.”