Chapter One
HANNAH
One year ago
The rain fell as if the heavens themselves were mourning, and all I could think was how much James would have hated it.
He would have hated the black umbrellas lined like soldiers, the somber faces of strangers, the minister’s droning voice praising charity galas and bright futures—as if my brother were a sanitized press release instead of a living, breathing disaster of a human being.
He would have hated the way our mother stood rigid as marble beside me, her gloved hand resting on my arm with just enough pressure to remind me I was being watched.
The mahogany casket caught the gray light as it sank into the ground, and something inside me sank with it.
“You’re slouching,” my mother whispered, her lips barely moving. “The photographers from Town and Country are on the east hill. Grief is no excuse for poor posture.”
I straightened my spine. Smiled the appropriate amount. Died a little more inside.
The minister was saying something about James’s philanthropic spirit, his dedication to the Pierce Foundation, his commitment to continuing the family legacy. I wanted to laugh, to scream. I wanted to grab the microphone and tell everyone the truth about my brother.
The truth was, James taught me how to sneak out of the house when I was fourteen.
He’d bribed the night security guard with a bottle of our father’s Scotch and shown me how to scale the garden wall without tearing my dress.
He taught me how to lie with a straight face, how to smile through a dinner party while plotting my escape.
The truth was that he crashed our father’s 1965 Bentley into a fountain on his twenty-first birthday and laughed about it for years.
He showed up to our grandmother’s ninetieth birthday with a tattoo artist named Razor as his plus-one just to watch our mother’s left eye twitch through the entire seven-course meal.
The truth was that James was reckless and selfish and absolutely impossible to control. But he was also the only person in our family who ever made me feel like I wasn’t insane for wanting something more than the life our parents had designed for us.
And now he was gone. Pills and alcohol, the coroner had said. A lethal combination. Our parents had buried the details along with the body, spun the story into something palatable for the press. A tragic accident. A young life cut short.
But I knew my brother. James didn’t do anything by accident.
The casket hit the bottom with a soft thud that echoed through my chest. My mother’s fingers tightened on my arm, a warning. I kept my face perfectly still, even as the question I’d been asking myself for days clawed at my insides.
Why, James? Why would you leave me here alone?
At the wake, I lasted forty-seven minutes before the walls started closing in.
I excused myself to use the restroom and kept walking past it, through the east wing, until I found the coat closet near the back entrance. I slipped inside and closed the door behind me, pressing my back against it in the darkness. The coats smelled like mothballs and old money.
Then I saw it.
His leather jacket. The one our father called “that ridiculous thing.” It was hanging there among the cashmere and wool, out of place and perfect.
I pulled it off the hanger and pressed my face into the worn leather.
Cologne. Cigarettes. And underneath, the faint chemical smell of turpentine because he’d been painting again.
He’d converted the pool house into a studio last year.
Our father had called it a waste of time and resources.
James had shrugged and said at least it was his time to waste.
The tears came then—silent and violent—racking through my body until my ribs ached and my lungs burned.
I sobbed into that jacket until the leather was wet with it, because James was dead and I would never get to yell at him again for being so reckless.
I would never get to hear him laugh or watch him charm his way out of trouble or feel like I had one ally in this godforsaken family.
I stayed there in the darkness for another ten minutes, before pulling myself back together piece by piece.
Because Pierce women don’t cry where people can see.
Present Day
My apartment was twelve hundred square feet of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over the city, and I’d spent the last three months with the curtains drawn.
The morning light filtered through the silk panels, casting everything in a dim golden glow that made the space feel smaller than it was. Softer. Safer.
I’d been screening calls for weeks. Ignoring texts. Letting the world spin on without me while I tried to remember how to breathe in a body that felt like it belonged to someone else.
The engagement had ended as soon as it had started, and the relief still surprised me sometimes.
On our last date, Michael’s face was etched with exasperation. We’d always found our meetings pleasant—but only as distant friends, bound by family business.
Marrying him would have satisfied my parents’ desperate need for extended family, since James was gone. It would also have kept his grandfather off his back about settling down. It was never about love, we both understood this. When he told me about her, I’d smiled. Felt relieved even.
We were better as friends. We always had been. After my engagement to Michael, my parents whisked me off to another billionaire heir, Garrett. When he found out I couldn’t produce an heir because of my infertility, he backed out. And now I am here. Alone again.
The tabloids didn’t help. They didn’t care about mutual decisions or quiet relief.
They wanted drama. Scandal. Poor unstable Hannah Pierce, too fragile for marriage, still recovering from her brother’s tragic death.
I let the story become whatever people wanted it to be because correcting them would have meant explaining things I didn’t have words for.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table. I ignored it. It buzzed again. I pulled a pillow over my head.
The front door opened.
“Don’t shoot, it’s just me.”
Juliette’s voice cut through the apartment, followed by the sound of small feet on hardwood.
“Aunt Hannah!”
Two tiny bodies launched themselves onto my couch before I could fully sit up. Mia, six years old with her mother’s dark curls, landed on my stomach. Theo, four and built like a small tank, grabbed my arm and started climbing me like a jungle gym.
“We brought you muffins,” Mia announced, pressing her face against mine. “Mommy said you needed cheering up.”
“Did she now?” I wrapped my arms around both of them, breathing in the smell of strawberry shampoo and playground dirt. Something in my chest ached in a way I’d learned to ignore. “What kind of muffins?”
“Blueberry,” Theo said seriously. “Because those are your favorite.”
“They are my favorite. You remembered.”
“I always remember.” He said it with such conviction that I had to smile.
Juliette appeared in my line of vision, two coffee cups in hand and a paper bag tucked under her arm.
She’d been my best friend since freshman year of college, back when we were both pretending to be people we weren’t.
She’d seen me through every disaster since then.
Every heartbreak. Every family catastrophe.
She was married now, to Dean—a man who looked at her as if she were the best thing that had ever happened to him. They had these two perfect children and a house in the suburbs with a vegetable garden and a dog named Biscuit. The kind of life I used to dream about before I learned better.
“Kids, why don’t you go set up camp in the drawing room? I think Aunt Hannah has those coloring books you like.”
“The ones with the dragons?” Mia’s eyes went wide.
“Bottom shelf by the window.”
They were off like shots, disappearing around the corner in a thunder of footsteps. I watched them go and felt that ache again, deeper this time. I pushed it down where it belonged.
“Han.” Juliette handed me a coffee, her eyes scanning my face, and something in her expression made my stomach tighten. She wasn’t smiling. Juliette always smiled—even when things were falling apart. That was her superpower. The fact that she wasn’t smiling now made the hair on my arms stand up.
“What?” I asked. “What is it?”
“Have you been online lately—social media, news sites, anything?”
I laughed, though it came out hollow. “You know I haven’t. Not since the engagement coverage. I can’t stomach seeing my face everywhere with those headlines.”
“I know. I know you haven’t.” She pulled out her phone, and I watched her hands shake slightly as she navigated to something. “Which is why I’m here. Because I didn’t want you to find out from anyone else.”
“Find out what? Jules… you’re scaring me.”
She turned the phone toward me.
A video was playing. Dim lighting, crowded dance floor, bodies moving in that loose way people move when they’ve had too much champagne. The camera was shaky—someone’s phone, probably, filming from across the room.
Then I saw him.
My heart stopped. Actually stopped—or at least that’s what it felt like—because there was James.
My brother. Alive on that screen, moving and breathing and smiling like he hadn’t been in the ground for a year.
His hand rested on a woman’s waist, his mouth close to her ear, that smile I knew so well spreading across his face.
I couldn’t breathe. I was looking at a ghost.
He was looking at this woman like she was the only person in the room, and I knew that look. I’d seen it a thousand times growing up, usually directed at whatever trouble he was about to get himself into.
The woman turned, laughing at something he’d said, and the camera caught her face full on.
I recognized her. Her photograph had been in every newspaper for weeks after the accident. Felicia Tucker. Thirty-one. Philanthropist. Mother.
Wife.
Simon Tucker’s wife.
“When is this from?” My voice didn’t even sound like mine.