Chapter 1

Ethan Shaw had been murdered.

The forensic pathologist examining his body was his own wife.

In the morgue, Dr. Vivian Sullivan stood beneath the white lights in a spotless lab coat. She was striking even behind her glasses, her brows drawn together as she studied the remains before her.

"The victim's face has been severely damaged, and both hands and feet were removed," she said. "There was nothing at the scene that could establish his identity?"

"Nothing," said Daniel Brooks, the junior medical examiner taking notes beside her. He kept his voice down. "If the case weren't such a mess, the department wouldn't have called in Lakeshore University's star professor."

Vivian didn't answer. She ran one gloved hand over the body.

Ethan's spirit stood beside the table, dazed.

He could barely remember the last time Vivian had touched him so gently.

In six years of marriage, they'd been intimate only a handful of times. Even then, Vivian had always been drunk. She'd never reached for him sober.

"Male, approximately thirty years old. Six feet tall. Lean build. No obvious tattoos or birthmarks, except..."

Her fingers paused at the throat, and something shifted in her voice.

"A two-inch scar across the neck. The pattern suggests a sharp surgical blade."

Daniel looked up before he could stop himself. "Professor, doesn't your husband have a scar in the same place--"

He caught himself, but Vivian had already raised her eyes. Nothing moved in her face.

"Are you suggesting this body is my husband?"

Daniel flushed. "No, I only meant--"

"Don't worry." Her voice was cool and even. "There's a second, finer scar beneath the old one. This man had another operation recently. Ethan didn't."

Six years earlier, Vivian had just begun working with the county medical examiner.

On her first major case, a superstitious relative accused the office of desecrating the dead. He made a scene at the station, and when nobody would listen, he seized a scalpel and lunged at Vivian's chest.

Ethan, the boy from next door, had come by to bring her dinner.

He stepped between them. The scalpel went into his throat.

Surgeons fought through the night to save him. They succeeded, but they warned that the blade had cut his airway and vocal cords. He might never speak again, and his breathing would always be limited.

Ethan's mother broke down. She gripped Vivian's arm and cried out everything her son had never said.

"Don't you understand? Ethan has loved you for years. That's why he took that blade. What's he supposed to do with the rest of his life now?"

Vivian was silent for a long time.

Then she said, "Margaret, I'll take care of him for the rest of mine."

She kept her word.

She stayed beside his hospital bed, and she married him the week he was discharged.

Over the years she became Lakeshore University's youngest professor of forensic pathology. Her cool beauty on a public-education crime program earned her the nickname "the Forensic Goddess." Wealthy heirs and powerful executives pursued her openly, and she never looked at any of them twice.

Every month, without fail, she took Ethan to his follow-up appointment. She handed him each pill herself. She dressed his scar with her own hands.

Her colleagues joked that losing his voice had earned Ethan the most perfect wife in the world.

Only Ethan knew the truth.

Vivian remembered every appointment. She never remembered his birthday.

She knew the side effects of every medication. She didn't know his favorite food.

She'd feed him his pills by hand, and then spend the rest of the month sleeping near the autopsy suite rather than coming home.

He used to believe she was simply cold by nature.

Then, six months ago, their anniversary came. Vivian was in New York for an academic conference, and Ethan flew out to surprise her.

She was nowhere near the conference hotel.

She was in the front row at Carnegie Hall, watching a young pianist perform the Moonlight Sonata, and her eyes burned with a warmth Ethan had never once been given.

The pianist was his younger brother, Noah Shaw.

After the concert, Vivian carried up blue roses, a wrapped gift, and a brown paper bag. Color rose in her face.

"Happy birthday, Noah. I made the chocolates myself. Pistachio, your favorite."

That was when Ethan understood.

Vivian could remember birthdays. She could blush. She could love.

She just didn't love him.

He flew home to Chicago alone.

After that, he stopped asking her to come to his appointments. When his old injury worsened two months ago and needed a second operation, he told her nothing. He signed the consent forms himself and walked into the operating room alone.

A nurse joked, "Where's that gorgeous, ice-cold wife of yours these days?"

Ethan smiled and wrote on the pad in his lap:

[She won't be coming anymore. We're getting divorced soon.]

He'd decided it long before. Once the surgery was behind him, he'd set her free.

Six years. Call it gratitude, call it penance. It was enough.

Then, days before the operation, a friend called with news. Twilight--the ring Ethan had spent years trying to trace--was going up for sale at an auction house overseas.

Vivian had been searching for that ring for as long as he'd known her. When he finally asked why it mattered so much, she said nothing, again and again, until one day she got tired of the question and snapped that it was the ring her father had proposed to her mother with. Her parents had died when she was small. It was the only thing of theirs she had left.

So Ethan spent every connection he had looking for it.

He never expected the news to come now, of all times.

Straight out of surgery, he flew abroad and spent almost everything he owned to bring Twilight home.

He'd planned to give her the ring the next time he saw her. Then he'd sit her down and tell her they should divorce.

That day never came.

He was murdered first.

Now husband and wife faced each other in a morgue, separated by stainless steel, by death, and by a face too ruined to know.

A needle clinked against a metal tray, and Ethan's spirit came back to the room.

Vivian stripped off her gloves. "Send the blood sample for analysis. We should have an identification in five days."

Five days.

That would be Vivian's thirtieth birthday.

Ethan lowered his head and smiled.

All right, then.

Vivian. Your thirtieth birthday.

My last gift to you is your freedom to go after the man you actually love.