Chapter 1

My wedding was three days away when the police told me my fiancé, David Reed, was dead.

They said there was a hiking accident. A fall. His body was lost to the sea.

Just like that, I went from a bride to a widow. A pregnant widow.

The world turned gray. I stopped leaving the house. I stopped talking. My hand stayed on my stomach, a constant, protective shield over the tiny life that would now never meet its father.

My friends and family tried to help. They brought food I didn't eat and offered words I didn't hear. They told me to be strong for the baby. I just nodded, a hollow shell of the woman I used to be.

A month after the accident, David' s mother, Eleanor, told me his older brother was coming home. Mark Reed. He' d been doing humanitarian work in Africa for years, a name I' d only heard in passing.

He arrived on a Tuesday. When I saw him, the air left my lungs. The resemblance was more than just familial; it was shocking. The same dark hair, the same strong jaw, the same way his eyes crinkled when he tried to smile.

He was a ghost in my living room.

Every time he spoke, his voice a slightly deeper version of David's, I would freeze. I found myself staring at him, tracing the lines of his face with my eyes, lost in a painful haze. It felt like I was being haunted.

One evening, I couldn't sleep. The baby was kicking, a restless dance inside me. I went downstairs for a glass of water and heard voices from the study. Eleanor and Mark.

I stopped, hidden by the turn in the hallway. I shouldn't listen, but something held me there.

And then I heard it. A laugh. Not Mark's careful, somber tone, but a laugh I knew better than my own heartbeat. It was David' s laugh.

My blood ran cold. I crept closer, my hand pressed to my mouth to stifle my own breathing. The study door was slightly ajar. I could hear every word clearly, and the world as I knew it shattered into a million pieces.