Chapter 4

On the second day after my death, Vincent went to Sophia's grave.

Sophia had grown up with him.

Her father ran a small clinic. When Vincent was hurt and had no money for a doctor, Sophia often slipped him medicine.

Six years ago, Sophia died in a car bombing.

That day, Vincent should have been in the car too.

Before he got in, he received a text from me.

I told him, "Someone is going to kill you in Red Hook. Don't get in the car. Leave now."

He listened to me, and so he lived.

Sophia got into that car instead, and died on the spot.

The police found my earring at the scene, and received an anonymous statement. It said that Whitmore Bank had sold Vincent's movements to the Moretti family in exchange for a three-hundred-million-dollar deposit.

That money really had gone into my father's bank.

The earring really was mine.

Every piece of evidence pointed to me.

Vincent concluded that I had warned him on purpose and then arranged the bomb to kill Sophia, so that with the person closest to him gone, he would have no choice but to come back to me.

"It wasn't me."

I explained it to him countless times.

He only asked, "Then how did you know there was a bomb in the car?"

I had no way to answer.

The information had come from the Moretti family's accountant.

I had paid the accountant to tell me every plan aimed at Vincent, and I had promised to protect his family. If I gave up his name, the Moretti family would kill him, his wife, and his children.

So I could only lie and say the tip had come from my father.

Which only made Vincent more certain that the Whitmore family had been part of the bombing.

After Sophia died, Vincent didn't strike back at once.

He spent five years investigating Whitmore Bank. Only when the evidence was complete did he deliberately approach me.

We met again at a charity gala.

By then my family's money troubles had begun. I had stopped competing and started meeting clients for my father. Vincent walked up to me, shielded me from a drunk, and put his own jacket around my shoulders.

I thought he had finally decided to forgive me.

For the next six months, he sent me flowers every day, went with me to the stables, and sat by my bed when I was ill. He remembered that I took two sugars in my coffee, and that I was afraid of thunder.

When he proposed, I said yes without hesitating.

Six months after the wedding, he abruptly bought up Whitmore Bank's debt and handed the police the evidence of my father's money laundering.

The bank collapsed, my father died after the hearing, and my brother was sentenced to prison.

I wept and asked him why.

He threw the photographs from the scene of Sophia's death in front of me.

"I married you so you could watch the Whitmore family disappear with your own eyes."

That was the day I learned that all his tenderness had been part of the plan.

It was also the day I fell down the stairs and lost the baby I had only just found out I was carrying.

He laid white roses on Sophia's grave.

"She's dead," he said.

I didn't know whether he meant Sophia or me.

"I destroyed Whitmore Bank, I put Arthur in prison, and I kept Eloise locked up for a year."

He stopped for a long time.

"But she just died like that."

I looked at him and couldn't understand why he wasn't pleased.

Hadn't he gotten his revenge?

He should have been satisfied.

But on the way back, he kept looking at the passenger seat.

That was where I used to sit.

Once I fell asleep in the car, and he pulled over and sat there for two hours, not even answering his phone, afraid of waking me.

When I woke, I asked him why.

He said coldly, "I just didn't want you dying in my car."

I didn't realize then that his hatred for me had already begun to change.