Chapter 1

Vincent hated me for six years.

He was certain I had betrayed him, and that I had gotten his childhood sweetheart Sophia killed.

So he destroyed my family, sent my brother to prison, and married me to torment me.

I explained many times but he never believed me once.

Then I died.

But among the things I left behind, he discovered that when he was bullied, I was the one who found the evidence. When the police took him away, I was the one who hired his lawyer. When his enemies came to kill him, I was the one who paid for the tip and warned him in time to run.

He hated me for all those years, and fell in love with me the year I died.

Chapter 1

Nine hours after I died, Vincent had my body sent to be cremated.

No funeral, no priest.

When the funeral home manager handed him the urn, the first snow of the year was falling on New York.

Vincent wore a black overcoat, and his face showed nothing at all.

"Don Moretti, the Whitmore family would like to bury the Donna in their family plot."

"She doesn't deserve it."

Then my brother Arthur's voice came from outside the door.

"Vincent, give my sister back to me!"

Arthur burst in and punched Vincent in the face.

Vincent didn't dodge.

His bodyguards had Arthur pinned to the floor in seconds.

Six years ago, Arthur had been the heir to Whitmore Bank. He lived in a mansion beside Central Park, had a driver whenever he went out, and could spend an ordinary man's monthly salary on a single meal.

Now Whitmore Bank was bankrupt.

My father was dead, and Arthur was in prison for financial crimes. Today he had been escorted out to claim my body.

And Vincent, whom Arthur had once looked down on, now controlled most of New York's underground business.

The docks, the casinos, the nightclubs, and the underground fight rings all paid him.

When the other families met him, they too had to greet him first as Don Moretti.

"Why is Eloise dead?" Arthur shouted from the floor. "What did you do to her?"

"She got Sophia killed and didn't dare face the consequences," Vincent said. "She killed herself."

"It wasn't her doing!"

Arthur cursed him, his eyes red.

"She was protecting you the whole time! You fool, you're going to regret this!"

Vincent sneered.

"The only thing I regret is letting her live six more years."

I stood beside him and heard every word clearly.

My body had stopped breathing the night before, but my soul had not left. I could only follow Vincent, and go no farther than thirty feet from him.

He took my urn and walked to the bank of the Hudson.

Suddenly I understood what he meant to do.

"No!"

I rushed to grab his hand and passed straight through his body.

Vincent opened the urn and poured all of my ashes into the river.

"This is what you owe Sophia."

A gust of wind blew past.

My ashes fell into the river, and a little settled on his black coat.

I looked at him, and suddenly I didn't want to cry anymore.

When he was seventeen, three boys ganged up on him at school and beat him.

I paid for the security footage and made the principal expel all three.

So he wouldn't know I liked him, I said to him on purpose, "I just didn't want you dying on school grounds and hurting the school's reputation."

He believed me.

Fifteen years later, he poured my ashes into the river.

I suppose that was what I got for lying.

Chapter 2

Vincent went back to the house we had lived in after the wedding.

It stood on the bank of the Hudson, far from the city.

When we were first married, he said it was quiet there, good for my health.

Six months later, he took away my phone, my passport, and my bank cards, and dismissed all the servants.

Only then did I understand that he had bought the house for one purpose. To lock me in.

"Before tomorrow, throw out everything of hers," he told his assistant, Luca.

"The things in the stable too?"

"All of it."

Luca didn't leave right away.

"The Donna's horse hasn't eaten since yesterday. The vet says it's been waiting for her."

Apollo was my last racehorse.

I was born into old-money New York. At twelve I won the national junior equestrian championship. At twenty I represented the United States in international competition.

After my family went bankrupt, I sold my jewelry, my gowns, and my trophies. To keep Apollo, I even mucked out other people's stalls at the stables.

When Vincent found out, he simply bought the stables, brought Apollo here, and hired the best vet.

I once believed he still cared about me.

But he said, "I just want you to watch your favorite thing become mine too."

Now, he was silent for a few seconds.

"Have the vet save it."

"And if it still won't eat?"

"Find a way to get food into it." Vincent's voice was cold. "It doesn't die without my permission."

I couldn't help a short laugh.

He had always been like this.

Whatever he wanted to keep, he threatened first.

He walked into the kitchen and saw the note on the refrigerator.

I had written it the day before. Beef on the second shelf, heat for ten minutes. Stomach pills in the cabinet. Don't just drink.

He crumpled the note into a ball and threw it in the trash.

A few seconds later, he bent down and took it back out.

He smoothed it open and looked at it for a long time.

"Eloise, you think dying will make me soft?"

I stood in front of him.

"That's right. Even dead, I'm still scheming against you."

He couldn't hear me.

He went upstairs and pushed open the bathroom door, and his face changed.

The cleaners hadn't come yet. There were shattered pill bottles on the floor, and by the bathtub was the blood I had left when I fell.

I hadn't planned to die.

My chest had hurt for three days, and last night the pain became too much to breathe through. The emergency bell was within reach. I just didn't want to struggle anymore.

Vincent stood in the doorway, his face going whiter and whiter.

"Who told you to leave this here?"

He called Luca and shouted loud enough for the whole house to hear.

After he hung up, he smashed the mirror with his fist.

The glass cut his hand, and the blood kept running down.

"Eloise!"

He shouted my name at the empty room.

"Why do you always threaten me with dying?"

I froze.

I was already dead.

And yet he thought I was still throwing a tantrum.

Chapter 3

The first time I saw Vincent, he was sixteen.

His mother, Maeve, waited tables in a bar. His real father was the head of the Moretti crime family, but he had never once acknowledged the boy.

Vincent lived with his mother on the poorest street on Manhattan's West Side.

He went to school by day and washed dishes at a restaurant by night.

The school gave him a full scholarship, but the rich students still looked down on him. His uniform was secondhand, and his lunch was often nothing but a free apple.

And I was the youngest daughter of the Whitmore family.

My father ran a bank. My mother came from a Boston shipping family. I grew up in a mansion, learned to ride, and everyone around me told me I could only marry a man of the same standing.

But I fell for Vincent.

Every day I had the driver buy an extra breakfast, declared it tasted terrible, and tossed it to him.

He couldn't afford a math tutor, so I pretended I couldn't do the problems, asked him to tutor me, and paid him the highest rate going.

When classmates framed him for stealing a watch, I found the footage proving someone else had slipped it into his bag.

When he was beaten and two of his ribs were broken, I had a lawyer warn those students' parents and force them to pay his medical bills.

I did so much, but I never dared say straight out that I liked him.

Because my father had warned me, "You may help the poor. You may not marry them."

On the night of the graduation ball, I finally decided to tell Vincent how I felt.

In a white gown, I waited two hours by the back door of the gym.

Vincent never came.

My brother Arthur brought me a receipt. He said Vincent had taken fifty thousand dollars from the Whitmore family and agreed never to see me again.

I saw Vincent's signature on the receipt.

I cried all night.

But I didn't know that Vincent had received a letter too.

Arthur had written it, copying my handwriting.

It said: I only got close to you to win a bet with my friends. Poor trash like you has no right to like me.

Arthur also brought men to break Vincent's right hand, threw the fifty thousand dollars at him, and forced him to sign the receipt.

That same night, my parents sent me to London. They replaced my phone and intercepted every letter I sent to Vincent.

That was how we were separated.

I believed he had abandoned me for money.

He believed I had been toying with him all along.

The misunderstanding lasted ten full years.

In those ten years, Vincent didn't go to college.

First he hauled cargo at the docks, then he collected debts for a nightclub. Sent to recover ten thousand dollars, he not only brought the money back but found out the debtor had been stealing the owner's goods.

On the strength of that, he became the youngest crew boss in that crime family.

The Moretti family knew he was the old Don's bastard, and more than once sent men to kill him. He was stabbed three times and shot twice. Every time he healed, he took a piece of their territory.

At twenty-six, he took the Brooklyn docks.

At twenty-nine, he forced his own father to acknowledge him in public, and drove the three legitimate sons who had once bullied him out of New York.

At thirty-two, he became the new Don, recognized by all Five Families.

I followed every piece of news about him.

The first time he appeared in the newspaper, I bought twenty copies.

The first time he opened a legitimate company, I secretly talked the bank into opening his account.

When he was shot and hospitalized, I was in the next room giving him my blood.

We didn't see each other for ten years, yet I knew every time he was hurt and every time he succeeded.

All he knew was that I was the one who had written to humiliate him, and who had gotten Sophia killed.

Chapter 4

On the second day after my death, Vincent went to Sophia's grave.

Sophia had grown up with him.

Her father ran a small clinic. When Vincent was hurt and had no money for a doctor, Sophia often slipped him medicine.

Six years ago, Sophia died in a car bombing.

That day, Vincent should have been in the car too.

Before he got in, he received a text from me.

I told him, "Someone is going to kill you in Red Hook. Don't get in the car. Leave now."

He listened to me, and so he lived.

Sophia got into that car instead, and died on the spot.

The police found my earring at the scene, and received an anonymous statement. It said that Whitmore Bank had sold Vincent's movements to the Moretti family in exchange for a three-hundred-million-dollar deposit.

That money really had gone into my father's bank.

The earring really was mine.

Every piece of evidence pointed to me.

Vincent concluded that I had warned him on purpose and then arranged the bomb to kill Sophia, so that with the person closest to him gone, he would have no choice but to come back to me.

"It wasn't me."

I explained it to him countless times.

He only asked, "Then how did you know there was a bomb in the car?"

I had no way to answer.

The information had come from the Moretti family's accountant.

I had paid the accountant to tell me every plan aimed at Vincent, and I had promised to protect his family. If I gave up his name, the Moretti family would kill him, his wife, and his children.

So I could only lie and say the tip had come from my father.

Which only made Vincent more certain that the Whitmore family had been part of the bombing.

After Sophia died, Vincent didn't strike back at once.

He spent five years investigating Whitmore Bank. Only when the evidence was complete did he deliberately approach me.

We met again at a charity gala.

By then my family's money troubles had begun. I had stopped competing and started meeting clients for my father. Vincent walked up to me, shielded me from a drunk, and put his own jacket around my shoulders.

I thought he had finally decided to forgive me.

For the next six months, he sent me flowers every day, went with me to the stables, and sat by my bed when I was ill. He remembered that I took two sugars in my coffee, and that I was afraid of thunder.

When he proposed, I said yes without hesitating.

Six months after the wedding, he abruptly bought up Whitmore Bank's debt and handed the police the evidence of my father's money laundering.

The bank collapsed, my father died after the hearing, and my brother was sentenced to prison.

I wept and asked him why.

He threw the photographs from the scene of Sophia's death in front of me.

"I married you so you could watch the Whitmore family disappear with your own eyes."

That was the day I learned that all his tenderness had been part of the plan.

It was also the day I fell down the stairs and lost the baby I had only just found out I was carrying.

He laid white roses on Sophia's grave.

"She's dead," he said.

I didn't know whether he meant Sophia or me.

"I destroyed Whitmore Bank, I put Arthur in prison, and I kept Eloise locked up for a year."

He stopped for a long time.

"But she just died like that."

I looked at him and couldn't understand why he wasn't pleased.

Hadn't he gotten his revenge?

He should have been satisfied.

But on the way back, he kept looking at the passenger seat.

That was where I used to sit.

Once I fell asleep in the car, and he pulled over and sat there for two hours, not even answering his phone, afraid of waking me.

When I woke, I asked him why.

He said coldly, "I just didn't want you dying in my car."

I didn't realize then that his hatred for me had already begun to change.

Chapter 5

When Luca was clearing out my dressing room, he found a wooden box under the floorboards.

"Throw it away," Vincent said.

Luca didn't. He set the box on the desk instead.

That night, Vincent opened it after all.

Inside was a high school yearbook.

I had folded down the corner of every page with a photograph of Vincent on it.

Beneath it were a dozen receipts.

The first was for his mother's surgery.

Maeve had been diagnosed with kidney disease and needed an operation at once. Vincent couldn't borrow the money. I sold a diamond necklace and paid the whole bill in the name of a charity fund.

The second was the lawyer's fee after Vincent was arrested.

The police called it armed robbery. I found the footage from the shop's back door proving he had been in another neighborhood at the time, and had a lawyer bring it to the prosecutor.

The third was Sophia's tuition for medical school.

Her grades were excellent, but she couldn't pay. I donated to the school from my own trust fund so they could give her an anonymous scholarship.

Vincent went through them one by one, and his face grew darker and darker.

The box also held my diary.

June 13. The police have finally agreed to drop the charges against Vincent, but I have to hand over the footage. Dad won't let me help him. We had a fight, and he pulled me from the Olympic trials.

September 2. The officer handling Vincent's case wants thirty thousand dollars. I sold the sapphire my grandmother left me, and the money is with the lawyer. Vincent said on television today that the thing he hates most is the pity of the rich. He doesn't know that the person helping him is me.

November 19. Arthur sent men after Vincent again. I sent Arthur the records of his misuse of bank funds. If anything happens to Vincent, I'll give the records to the FBI.

Vincent shut the diary abruptly.

"Fake."

He said it loudly, as if that could prove he hadn't been wrong.

At the bottom of the box was a silver saint's medal.

Vincent had lost it the night of the graduation ball.

I searched all night along the street where he had been beaten, and finally pulled it out of a storm drain.

Vincent picked up the medal, and his hands began to shake.

Just then, the prison hospital called.

Arthur had swallowed contraband pills and was being resuscitated.

When he woke, he said only one thing.

"Get Vincent here. I have the real evidence about Sophia's death."