At Vanessa Vale’s wedding, she looked me in the face in front of 280 guests and said, “Get out, you scum.” The string quartet stopped so suddenly that I could hear glasses clinking at the tables behind me. Vanessa stood there in nearly fifty thousand euros of white silk, while I wore an eighty-nine-dollar beige dress and carried my mother’s old leather bag. And before the night was over, the invitation inside that bag would make her new husband question almost everything she had told him.

The ballroom was so quiet I could hear the hum of the air conditioning vents.

I stared at the drawing in my hands. My stomach turned violently.

I looked down at Lily.

“Lily,” I whispered. “Did you draw this?”

The little girl nodded slowly, tears welling in her eyes. “I was hiding in the closet. Auntie V told me if I told anyone, the police would take me away to a bad place.”

Adrian snatched the drawing from my hands.

He stared at it, his chest heaving as he fought for breath.

His mother hadn’t died of a stroke at the train station. She had collapsed, yes. She was rushed to the hospital. But she had been recovering.

She died three days later in her private room. The doctors said it was a secondary clot.

“You smothered her,” Adrian said. The words barely made it past his lips.

Vanessa backed up against the table. She knocked over a crystal vase, sending water and white roses crashing to the floor.

“She was going to ruin everything!” Vanessa screamed, her perfect mask completely stripped away, revealing the terrified, vicious woman underneath. “She found out my father was the one who stole the pension funds! She was going to go to the police! My family would have been destroyed!”

“So you killed her,” Thomas said, tears streaming down his weathered face. “You killed my wife, and then you seduced my son to ensure you had control of the company so the audit would never happen.”

“I loved you, Adrian!” Vanessa sobbed, reaching out toward him.

Adrian recoiled as if she were covered in acid.

“Don’t you ever say that to me again,” Adrian said.

Marcus chuckled darkly from the doorway. “Quite the wedding, Adrian. Look, I didn’t kill anyone. I just took a little hush money. I’m walking out that door now. Try to stop me, and I’ll leak the corporate files to the SEC.”

Marcus turned to leave.

But I noticed something.

When Vanessa had knocked over the vase, she had braced her hands against the table. Her heavy, white silk sleeve had slid up her forearm.

And wrapped tightly around her wrist was a simple, braided leather bracelet.

I stopped breathing.

“Vanessa,” I said, my voice cutting through the chaos.

She looked at me with pure, unadulterated hatred.

“What do you want, you pathetic loser?” she spat.

I pointed at her wrist.

“Where did you get that bracelet?”

Vanessa quickly yanked her sleeve down. “It’s none of your business.”

I stepped forward. I didn’t care about the cameras. I didn’t care about the guests.

“My mother braided that bracelet,” I said, my voice rising. “She gave it to Adrian’s mother twenty years ago when they were in the hospital together.”

Answer one.

Vanessa hadn’t just stolen the necklace to look beautiful. She had stripped Adrian’s mother of everything she was wearing in that hospital room.

Open two.

Why would Vanessa keep a worthless leather bracelet?

Vanessa glared at me. “She was a rich old fool. She said it was her lucky charm. I took it because she didn’t need luck anymore.”

“You didn’t just take it for spite,” a new voice echoed.