Chapter 1 THE DRESS MY MOTHER BOUGHT ME

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The night my father threw me out, I was wearing the white dress my mother bought me three days before she died.

It was a simple white cotton dress from Zara, not designer, not expensive. But she had saved for it. She knew she was dying. She wanted me to have something beautiful for my first day of middle school. I was twelve then. I am nineteen now. The dress was too tight, too short, the seams pulling at my hips, but I still wore it when I felt scared. Because it still smelled like her, faintly, like vanilla and hospital soap.

Mom died when I was twelve. Ovarian cancer, stage four, aggressive. They gave her three months. She lasted six weeks. I remember everything about Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan - the cold white walls, the beeping machines, the way my father, Richard Cole, stood by the window and couldn't look at her because he was already thinking about business. She held my hand, her fingers so thin they felt like bird bones, and whispered, "Isabella, be kind, but never be stupid. Promise me."

I promised. I have tried to keep that promise for seven years.

For three years after she died, it was just me and Dad in that cold Upper East Side townhouse on 73rd and Park. Four floors, five bedrooms, marble floors that echoed. Empty. He worked sixteen hours a day on his real estate company, Cole Properties. He thought money could fill the hole Mom left. It couldn't. I learned to cook at thirteen. I learned to do my own laundry. I learned to be invisible.

Then when I was fifteen, exactly three years after Mom's funeral, he brought them home without warning.

"Isabella, this is Victoria and her daughter Chloe. They will be living with us now."

Victoria Laurent was forty, blonde, perfect, with a smile that never reached her ice-blue eyes. She wore a Chanel suit that I later learned Dad had bought her. Chloe was sixteen, a year older than me, blonde, blue-eyed, five-foot-nine, the kind of pretty that gets you free drinks in Soho. Everyone at Spence School called her an angel. Dad, on day one, called her "my new princess" and put his arm around her. He had never called me princess. Not once.

I tried. God, you have to understand, I tried so hard. I gave Chloe my old room because Victoria said the light was better for Chloe's skin. I shared my bathroom. I let Chloe borrow my mother's pearl necklace - the only real jewelry Mom left me - because Victoria said "it's good for sisters to share, sweetie, your mother would want that." I even gave Chloe my sketchbook once because she said she wanted to learn fashion.

Chloe smiled at me and told Dad I was being mean when I asked for it back.

By the time I was eighteen and got into NYU for Fashion Design - my dream - I had learned to survive by having one thing that was completely mine, that they couldn't touch.

Jake Morrison.

Jake was my boyfriend from freshman orientation. Brown hair, hazel eyes, business major, lacrosse player, from a good family in Connecticut. We had been together for almost three years. He said he loved my messy dark wavy hair, my freckles, my dreams of owning my own fashion house one day. He said I was beautiful in a way that was different - not like the blonde girls. He said I was real. He was supposed to be safe. He was the one person I thought would never betray me because he saw what Chloe and Victoria did to me at home.

That night, October 14th, was supposed to be special. I had just finished a two-week internship at Marc Jacobs downtown - unpaid, but they let me stitch samples. I was exhausted but happy. It was Jake's twenty-first birthday. I had spent my last $80 from my internship stipend on a small chocolate cake from Magnolia Bakery, his favorite. I had also bought a card where I wrote, "To my future - I love you."

I came home early to our little apartment near Washington Square - the one we shared with two other girls but where Jake basically lived - at 7pm. I wanted to surprise him. I wanted to light the cake.

My key didn't work. I jiggled it. The lock was turned from inside. Music was loud - The Weeknd, Jake's playlist for... intimate moments. My stomach dropped. I knocked. No answer. My heart started hammering so loud I could hear it.

I used the spare key we kept under the fake plant mat. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped it twice.

I opened the door. The living room was empty but Jake's shoes were by the door. And a pair of white high heels I recognized. Chloe's. The Louboutins Dad bought her for her eighteenth birthday. The ones she said cost more than my entire wardrobe.

The bedroom door was open. Just a crack. Light spilling out.

I shouldn't have looked. Part of me knew. But I pushed it open.

Jake was in my bed. Naked. Sweat on his back. And on top of him, riding him, completely naked except for my mother's pearl necklace around her neck, was Chloe. My stepsister.

Her eyes met mine over her shoulder. She didn't stop. She didn't even look embarrassed. She smiled. A slow, cruel, victorious smile.

"Oops," Chloe said, panting, still moving. "You weren't supposed to be home early, Bella. Didn't Jake tell you he had a study group?"

Jake jumped up so fast he fell off the bed. Naked, scrambling for his boxers. "Isabella! Oh my God! It's not - it's not what it looks like! She came over to - "

But it was exactly what it looked like. It was worse than what it looked like because she was wearing Mom's necklace while doing it.

The cake box fell from my hands. The cake inside slid and hit the floor. Chocolate frosting exploded all over the white dress. My mother's dress. The white cotton dress now had brown stains.

Chloe finally stood up, completely unashamed, and wrapped herself in MY sheet - my white sheets with little stars that Mom had bought me when I moved to NYU.

She walked past me, close, so only I could hear, and whispered in my ear, her breath hot: "He's always been mine, you stupid bitch. Since sophomore year. Daddy will believe me, not you. Watch how it's done."

Then she started crying. Instantly. Loud, perfect, heaving sobs. Oscar-worthy tears. She ran out of the apartment, half-naked, holding the sheet around her, screaming at the top of her lungs in the hallway, "DADDY! DADDY! HELP! ISABELLA ATTACKED ME!"

I didn't understand then. I was too shocked. I thought she was crazy. I didn't realize she was setting the trap she had planned for months.

Twenty minutes later - I know because I sat on the floor in the chocolate cake for twenty minutes, unable to move - my father burst into my apartment with Victoria. They must have been nearby. Chloe had called them before I even arrived, I realize now.

Chloe was now in Victoria's long wool coat, sobbing into Victoria's shoulder, shaking.

"Daddy, I tried to stop her! I came to tell Jake that Isabella was cheating on him with a boy from fashion school! And she went crazy! She tried to seduce Jake to make him stay! She threw me on the bed! She ripped my clothes!"

It was so absurd, so insane, that I actually laughed. A broken, hysterical laugh.

"What? Dad, are you listening to yourself? She's lying! I caught THEM! In MY bed! She's wearing Mom's necklace!"

I pointed at Chloe's neck. The pearls.

Dad looked at me. At the ruined cake on the floor. At the messy bed. At my stained, ruined white dress. At Chloe's fake tears.

And he chose. In two seconds, he chose.

His face turned to disgust. The same cold, hard face he used for contractors who messed up his buildings.

"Isabella Cole, you are just like your mother. Jealous, crazy, and manipulative. Trying to steal your own sister's boyfriend? After everything we've done for you?"

"She is NOT my sister!" I screamed, tears finally coming. "Mom would never - "

"Don't you DARE mention your mother!" he roared, so loud the neighbors banged on the wall. "Your mother would be ashamed of you! Look at you! Dressed like a child, covered in cake, acting like a whore!"

Victoria put a perfectly manicured hand on his arm, playing the peacemaker. "Richard, darling, maybe she's just confused. She always wanted what Chloe has. The looks, the boyfriend, the popularity. It's not her fault."

That was it. The final lie. The final nail.

My father grabbed my arm, his fingers digging into my skin, and dragged me to the door. He threw my old battered suitcase at me - the one I had packed for my Paris Fashion Week internship interview next week.

"You are dead to me. Get out of my house. Get out of my family. You are no longer a Cole. You are no longer my daughter."

Rain was pouring in Manhattan. November rain, freezing, needles. He pushed me into the hallway in that white dress, now with chocolate and mud and my own tears, wearing only one sock.

The door slammed. The lock clicked. I heard Chloe laugh inside. A clear, happy laugh. And Jake said nothing. He said nothing to defend me.

I sat in that hallway for an hour, shaking, freezing, in the dress my mother bought me before she died.

Then I called the only number I had left in my phone that wasn't them. My old professor, Madame Dubois, who taught at Parsons and had once said, "Isabella, you have real talent, if you ever need a place in Paris, call me."

I called. My voice was broken. "Madame Dubois? You said if I ever needed a place..."

There was a pause. Then she said in her beautiful French accent, "Mon petit chou, come. Come tonight. I am waiting."

I landed at Charles de Gaulle at 6am with $200 in my wallet, that white dress in a plastic trash bag, and a vow so deep it felt like it rewrote my DNA: One day, I will make them choke on that night. One day, I will be so beautiful, so rich, so powerful, that they will have to beg me to look at them.

And I will look away.

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