Chapter 2

Eleanor Hayes stared, her perfectly sculpted eyebrows arching high. Her gaze shifted to me, a flicker of something – guilt, perhaps – in her sharp blue eyes. Then, her frown deepened. “That’s impossible,” she declared, her voice cutting through the murmurs. “The report must be mistaken.” I understood her disbelief. Eleanor was my late mother’s best friend from Stanford. After my parents died in that plane crash, and my grandmother’s health failed, it was Eleanor my grandmother entrusted me to. Along with the liquidated assets of my family’s company, all deposited into my name. Eleanor knew how I felt about Ethan. She’d always wanted to see us together. Last month, she’d gone to an extreme. She’d drugged her own nephew, locked him in my suite. Even that, the forced intimacy, hadn’t changed Ethan’s mind about marrying me. I still felt the sting of the emergency contraceptive packet hitting my face. His eyes, cold and filled with revulsion. “Sarah,” he’d hissed, “stooping to this? Drugging me to force my hand? Did you enjoy it? You disgust me.” “You’re just a childhood friend, nothing more. Tiffany is the only one I want. Take these. Don’t make me force you.” I remembered watching some old movie with him when we were kids. The hero forced the heroine to take a morning-after pill. Our health teacher had explained how damaging those pills were. Ethan, then a boy, had looked at me, his face indignant. “Sarah, you have to protect yourself when you grow up. If any jerk ever tries to make you take that stuff, you tell me. I’ll beat him senseless.” He became that jerk. He knew I hated anything bitter. Yet, convinced I’d orchestrated the drugging, he wouldn’t listen to my denials. He thought I was lying. To punish me, he made me swallow the entire pack, dry. No water. The acrid taste filled my mouth, a bitterness that seeped into my very soul. Tears streamed down my face as I choked down the last pill. Only then did Ethan, impeccably dressed, stand up. “Stop the waterworks,” he’d said, his voice like ice. “You brought this on yourself.” Fate had its cruel jests. Despite the pills, I conceived. And Tiffany, in the last life, used that to stage her dramatic exit. She’d sent Ethan a video before her “suicide.” Disheveled, tear-streaked. “Sarah deliberately threw up the pills, Ethan. She has your baby. You should marry her. I just wanted to be near you, even without a title. But she couldn’t even allow me that. She sent men… to violate me! Since it’s like this, I’ll disappear. Let her have you. Ethan, I love you. Goodbye. Be happy.” Ethan had searched all night, finding only her “body.” From that day, he planned my death; my role as Tiffany's companion in the afterlife. Ethan Hayes had connections everywhere. A proper investigation, a coroner’s report, would have shown Tiffany hadn’t been assaulted. That I wasn’t involved. But he never asked. Never checked. He simply condemned me, convinced of my guilt, certain I’d induced vomiting to keep the baby.