Chapter 1

After my wife cheated, we became the couple everyone in our circle knew for pure hatred.

She dropped dead right beside me, and all I did was dig a shallow spot on the hill behind my hometown and bury her.

I didn't shed a single tear.

There was no camera and no witness at the scene, and I was afraid people would think I'd killed her, so I only reported her missing.

Four years later, on the very day a lawyer came to my door to settle her estate, the doorbell rang.

I opened it, and there stood my wife, dead for four years.

She threw her arms around me, eyes brimming with tears.

She said a car crash had left her with amnesia, that's why she'd been gone so long, and now she was finally home.

I looked at this woman standing in front of me, swearing she'd build a real life with me from now on.

And every hair on my body stood on end.

1.

"You've had it so hard these years, all on your own."

"I'm back now. From here on, I'll take care of everything at home."

Rose Dickerson said it, then marched straight into the kitchen and washed the dishes I'd left in the sink that morning.

My hand found the fruit knife on the table. Cold sweat ran down my back.

How could this be?

I buried her on that hill with my own two hands.

I pulled myself together and walked slowly up behind her, knife in hand.

"Where have you been all these years? You never once got in touch."

Rose glanced back with a smile, rose up on her toes, and kissed me on the cheek.

"For the first three years I couldn't even remember my own name. I worked off the books at some factory out in the country."

"My memory only started coming back recently. That's when I remembered I still had a husband I'd loved for years."

At those words, my grip on the knife tightened.

Rose and I had been together many years, but we'd stopped loving each other a long time ago.

After I helped her build everything from nothing, she turned into a different person.

An endless string of men around her. Fights that never ended.

I'd already talked myself into letting it go.

Plenty of couples can share hardship but not success. As long as our shared assets stayed with me, I could turn a blind eye.

But then Rose found her second spring and fell for the new intern at the company, Brendan Fox.

Brendan didn't just want money. He wanted the legal husband's seat too.

Rose felt nothing for what we'd been. She schemed against me again and again.

She wanted to saddle me with crushing debt, then kick me out the door.

She even slipped something into the water cooler, trying to poison me to death.

I couldn't stomach it. I'd planted this tree with my own hands. Why should someone else sit back and enjoy the fruit?

After one big fight, I followed Rose when she went out for one of her business dinners.

And I saw it happen. She collapsed from some sudden illness and died right in front of me.

Thinking back on that day, a chill ran through me all at once.

If she really was Rose, the first thing she'd have done after cheating death was call the police and have me arrested.

Instead she hid for four years and turned up right when I was about to inherit the estate.

Or else she wasn't Rose at all.

I slid the knife up into my sleeve and said, easy as anything,

"Go take a shower first. Wash off all the bad luck from out there."

She agreed readily, and glanced back on her way into the bathroom to joke,

"I get it. Have to get clean before I climb into my husband's bed."

Water started rushing in the bathroom soon after.

I made a show of fetching a fresh towel, my heart already in my throat.

The year we got married, the basement we lived in caught fire out of nowhere.

When the burned-through door beam came crashing down, Rose threw herself over me without a second's hesitation.

It left a vicious scar running from her right shoulder down to the left side of her lower back.

That scar had once been Rose's get-out-of-jail-free card in my heart.

One look at it and I'd know whether this was the real her or a fake.

I stood outside the door and fought with myself a long time.

At last I drew a deep breath and forced myself calm.

The moment I pushed the door open, what I saw made my mind detonate.