Chapter 1 - The Day My Father Came Home
“Disloyal wives sleep with dogs.”
Damon said it as if he were announcing a rule that had existed long before either of us was born.
I was eight months pregnant.
Barefoot.
Cold.
And locked behind the steel bars of the kennel building behind our house.
My name is Evelyn Mercer Cross.
For three years, I had been Mrs. Damon Cross.
For the first two of those years, I believed I had married the most charming man in New York.
By the third, I understood that charm could be another kind of weapon.
I curled one arm around my stomach as my daughter shifted inside me.
“Please,” I whispered. “Just let me inside.”
Damon stood on the other side of the bars wearing the gray cashmere coat I had bought him for our second anniversary.
Beside him stood Lacey Hart.
My oldest friend.
Or the woman I had once believed was my oldest friend.
She wore my ivory silk robe.
The one my mother had given me the week before she died.
Lacey slowly tied the belt around her waist.
“The dogs never complained,” she said.
Damon laughed.
I stared at her.
Six months earlier, Lacey had arrived at our home claiming that her landlord had sold her apartment building and she needed somewhere to stay for “a few days.”
I gave her the guest suite.
She stayed a week.
Then a month.
Then I noticed the late-night whispers.
Damon’s hand against the small of her back.
A hotel receipt in his jacket.
And finally, two nights earlier, I had walked into my own bedroom and found them together.
Damon hadn’t apologized.
He hadn’t even looked embarrassed.
Instead, his face had become frighteningly calm.
“You weren’t supposed to come upstairs.”
That had been his response.
Not I’m sorry.
Not let me explain.
Just that.
I had told him I was leaving.
He had taken my phone.
Then my car keys.
Then he had told the staff I was suffering from “pregnancy-related emotional instability.”
The next morning, he locked me in the kennel.
No one challenged him.
Almost no one.
Our housekeeper, Nora Quinn, had tried.
Damon fired her.
I hadn’t seen her since.
Now, after nearly seven hours inside that cold building, I heard tires crunching over gravel.
Damon frowned.
Lacey turned toward the driveway.
A black Lincoln stopped beside the house.
The rear door opened.
My father stepped out.
Charles Mercer had been overseas for nearly six weeks negotiating the sale of a medical manufacturing division in Singapore.
Damon had repeatedly told me Dad had extended his trip.
Apparently, he hadn’t.
My father took three steps toward the house.
Then he heard me.
“Dad!”
Everything stopped.
He turned.
I will never forget his face.
The leather travel bag slipped from his hand.
“Evelyn?”
He walked toward the kennel.
Then faster.
Then he ran.
My father was sixty-three years old and had undergone knee surgery two years earlier, but he ran toward me like a man half his age.
“What happened?”
I grabbed the bars.
His eyes traveled from my swollen belly to my bare feet, then to the bruise around my wrist.
His face changed.
“Who did this?”
I looked at Damon.
“Dad… Damon gave her my room.”
My father slowly turned.
Lacey laughed nervously.
“Charles, this looks worse than it is.”
Dad stared at her.
“My daughter is eight months pregnant and locked inside a dog kennel.”
“She was having an episode,” Damon said.
Dad walked toward him.
“Open it.”
“Charles—”
“Open. The. Door.”
Damon didn’t move.
So my father did.
The key was hanging from a hook beside Damon.
Dad grabbed it, opened the kennel, and wrapped his coat around me.
The moment I stepped outside, my knees nearly collapsed.
Dad caught me.
That was when he smelled something.
His expression sharpened.
“Why does she smell like medication?”
Damon’s eyes flickered.
Only for a second.
But my father noticed.
“What medication?” I asked.
Damon stepped back.
Dad handed me to our gardener, Mr. Alvarez.
Then he walked straight toward my husband.
Damon raised his hands.
“Charles, don’t do something stupid.”
My father slapped him.
Hard.
Damon stumbled backward against the kennel gate.
Lacey screamed.
Dad grabbed Damon by the front of his coat.
“You want someone behind bars?”
He shoved him inside.
Damon’s eyes widened.
“What are you doing?”
Dad slammed the metal door.
Then turned the key.
“You can wait for the police exactly where you thought my daughter belonged.”
For the first time since I had married him, Damon Cross looked afraid.
Not angry.
Afraid.
Lacey rushed toward the house.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dad demanded.
She froze.
“That robe belongs to my dead wife.”
Her face went white.
Ten minutes later, two patrol cars and an ambulance pulled into the driveway.
Damon shouted through the kennel bars that my father was assaulting him.
The officers ignored the performance.
Officer Maya Torres took one look at my wrists and asked me quietly, “Did your husband prevent you from leaving against your will?”
“Yes.”
“Did he physically place you in there?”
“Yes.”
“Did he give you any medication?”
“I don’t know.”
Damon stopped yelling.
That silence mattered.
At the hospital, Dr. Hannah Pike examined me.
The baby was fine.
I cried when I heard her heartbeat.
Dad held my hand.
Then Hannah returned with my bloodwork.
She closed the door behind her.
“Evelyn, I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
“Have you taken any prescription sedatives in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
She looked at Dad.
Then back at me.
“There’s a significant amount of clonazepam in your bloodstream.”
I stared at her.
“I don’t take clonazepam.”
Dad’s fingers tightened around the armrest.
Hannah lowered her voice.
“At this concentration, someone who isn’t used to it could become confused, weak, or unusually drowsy.”
Suddenly, I remembered the tea Damon had brought me that morning.
I had thought it tasted bitter.
My father stood.
“Call the police.”
“I already did,” Hannah said.
The door opened fifteen minutes later.
Officer Torres entered.
She carried a clear evidence bag.
Inside was a small bottle.
The label had my name on it.
EVELYN CROSS.
Clonazepam.
Prescribed by a psychiatrist I had never met.
Dr. Leonard Voss.
My father stared at the bottle.
Then something about his expression frightened me.
“Dad?”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you know that name?”
Slowly, he sat down.
“Yes.”
The room seemed to shrink.
“How?”
His voice barely rose above a whisper.
“Because Leonard Voss signed the psychiatric evaluation that declared your mother incompetent three weeks before she died.”
I stopped breathing.
My mother had died seven years earlier.
Everyone told me it was cancer.
Everyone told me her final weeks had been peaceful.
Nobody had ever told me she had been declared mentally incompetent.
“Why would she need a psychiatric evaluation?”
Dad looked at me.
And for the first time that night, I realized Damon might not be the beginning of what was happening to me.
He might only be the newest part.
My father swallowed.
“Because someone tried to take control of her shares in Mercer Holdings.”
I stared at him.
“Who?”
Dad looked toward the hospital window.
Then he said a name I had known almost my entire life.
“Gavin Shaw.”
Our family’s chief financial officer.
May you like
My father’s best friend.
And the man who had introduced me to Damon Cross.
