Chapter 1
My name is Claire Whitfield, and my marriage lasted exactly two hours before I learned it had never been real at all.
It started as a joke. A small, harmless one. We were in the bridal suite on the forty-second floor of a hotel overlooking the Chicago skyline, the kind of room people save years to afford for one night. Daniel had gone down to thank the last guests lingering at the bar. I decided to hide under the bed and surprise him when he came back, to hear him laugh the way he always laughed when I did something silly. For three years he told people my sense of humor was the reason he fell for me. Hours earlier he'd stood in front of two hundred people and promised to choose me every day for the rest of his life.
So when the suite door opened, I was already smiling.
Then I heard heels. Sharp, deliberate, the kind that announce a woman who has never doubted her place in a room.
I knew them before I saw them. Margaret, my new mother-in-law.
"I'm upstairs now," she said, dropping her phone onto the comforter and switching it to speaker. "Daniel's still seeing people out. The girl's probably touching up her makeup somewhere."
The girl. An hour earlier she had held my face in both hands and called me the daughter she'd always wanted.
A voice answered through the speaker, female, amused. "So it's done? Everything's signed?"
May you like
Margaret laughed, low and satisfied. "The license is filed. The ring's on her hand. And that townhouse on Astor Street will belong to this family within the month, whether she understands what's happening or not."
I stopped breathing.
