Chapter 1: The Woman in the Mirror
“Claire Bennett was found dead in her apartment,” the news anchor said, “early Tuesday morning.”
I was sitting up in a hospital bed when I heard my own name. The TV was bolted to the wall across from me, the sound turned low, and on the screen was my face. My real face. The photo from my design firm’s website, the one where I’d let my hair down because Julian liked it that way.
“Bennett, thirty-two, had pleaded guilty last month to the hit-and-run death of cyclist Daniel Brooks,” the anchor went on. “Police say the death appears to be an accidental overdose. She was awaiting sentencing.”
I didn’t take pills. I didn’t even take Advil without reading the label twice.
And I wasn’t dead.
I was right here.
I tried to say so, and my voice came out wrong. Higher. Thinner. A stranger’s voice. I looked down at my hands on the white blanket, and they were wrong too. Longer fingers. No engagement ring. A plastic hospital bracelet on the left wrist that said DOYLE, GRACE M.
My heart started going so hard the monitor beside me began to beep.
A nurse in purple scrubs hurried in. “Hey, hey. Easy, Grace. You’re okay. You’re at Grady. You were in a car accident. You’ve been asleep for nine days.”
“I’m not,” I whispered. “I’m not Grace.”
She smiled the way nurses smile at confused patients. “That’s normal after a head injury. Things come back in pieces. Your mom’s on her way.”
My mom died when I was nineteen.
When the nurse left, I got out of the bed. My legs shook like a newborn calf’s, and the IV pole rattled behind me, but I made it to the little bathroom and switched on the light.
The woman in the mirror wasn’t me.
She was younger, maybe twenty-seven. Long, straight, dark-brown hair with blunt bangs. Gray-blue eyes. A fading bruise along the jaw and a row of stitches at the hairline. Pretty, in a serious, careful way. A face I had seen before. Somewhere. Recently.
I gripped the sink and stared until she stared back.
I remembered the last night of my life in pieces, the way you remember a fever. My apartment in Midtown. A knock I thought was the pizza. The smell of cedar cologne. A gloved hand. Then nothing. Then this.
I’d read stories about things like this. I’d never believed them. I’m an interior designer, not a mystic. I believe in measurements.
But the bracelet said Grace Doyle, and the mirror agreed.
When I got back to the bed, the news had moved on to a press conference. A podium on the steps of a Buckhead mansion. Reporters, cameras. And behind the podium, in a charcoal three-piece suit, his dark-blond hair perfectly combed, stood the man I’d been engaged to for three years.
Julian Ashford.
He looked tired. He looked handsome. He looked exactly like the man who had held my face in his hands six weeks ago and begged me to save his life.
“Claire made a terrible mistake,” he said to the cameras. “We’re all heartbroken.”
A terrible mistake.
I had made a mistake. I’d believed him.
Just behind his left shoulder, in an ivory silk dress, stood Sienna Vale. His “business partner.” The woman who had actually been driving his car the night Daniel Brooks died. As the cameras clicked, she reached forward and slid her hand into his.
He let her.
And then, as if the universe wanted to make sure I understood, the camera pulled back, and I saw who was standing at the edge of the crowd, a few steps behind the Ashford family.
A paralegal from the law firm that represented them. Dark-brown hair. Blunt bangs. A serious, careful face, holding a legal pad against her chest and watching Julian like she was memorizing him.
Grace Doyle.
The woman whose body I was wearing had been there. Watching. The day before I died.
