Never In Another Life

Three years after faking my death, Adrian Shaw and our son found me. I fought to get away from them. I cried. I struggled. I told them I'd rather die than go back. Then my seven-year-old son put his hand on my mother's ventilator. Adrian stood beside him, and his voice shook when he said it. "Mia, you pick. "Either your mother suffocates in that bed, or you're Mrs. Shaw again." I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up. But I didn't have a choice. I signed the papers and married him a second time. When I walked back into that house, I became the perfect wife and the perfect mother. Whenever my adopted sister Nina was upset and needed Adrian with her, I never called him — not even the night a perforated ulcer put me on an operating table. When my son wouldn't eat anything but Nina's cooking, I went and brought her home to live with us myself. Even on my birthday, when Nina started crying and said she was jealous of me — that I had a husband like that and a son, and nobody had ever given her a decent birthday present in her life — I slid the garnet bracelet off my wrist without stopping to think and pressed it into her hand. The deep red stones glowed against Nina's pale skin. Adrian's eyes went red. He caught my wrist and said it through his teeth. "Mia, I walked five hundred miles of the Camino for that bracelet. "It was our promise to each other."