Chapter 1 - The Man Wearing a Dead Man's Face
The first glass slipped because somebody behind me brushed my elbow.
Champagne leaped from my silver tray and spread across the front of a stranger's black tuxedo like a pale, glittering wound.
I was already apologizing when the blonde woman beside him seized the tray with both hands.
She ripped it from my grip and hurled it across the marble floor.
Crystal shattered beneath the chandeliers, and forty wealthy guests turned toward the noise.
Then her palm struck my cheek.
My head snapped sideways, and I stumbled into the central banquet table.
A flower arrangement overturned against my shoulder, plates skidded over the linen, and an expensive vase tumbled onto the floor.
"WATCH YOUR DAMN HANDS, YOU STUPID WAITRESS!" she screamed.
My name was Clara Hale, although the hotel knew me by my maiden name, Clara Mason.
I was twenty-nine years old, wearing a white blouse, black vest, trousers, practical shoes, and an apron whose pocket contained the one document I could never bring myself to throw away.
It was the death certificate of my husband, Gabriel Hale.
Three years earlier, I had buried him in a sealed coffin and watched the dirt fall until somebody led me away.
I had worked my way back toward a life that almost resembled normal, yet every night I still remembered the sound of that dirt.
The woman in crimson bent toward me with her diamond necklace swinging.
"Do you know who you've embarrassed?" she demanded.
I tasted blood where my teeth had caught the inside of my cheek.
"It was an accident," I whispered.
"Your entire existence is an accident."
She reached for me again, but the man in the stained tuxedo moved first.
He caught her wrist, pulled her away, and placed himself between us.
"That's enough," he said.
His voice passed through me more violently than the slap.
I knew that voice.
I had heard it in darkness, through hospital doors, over cheap speakers during road trips, and beside me at night when I couldn't sleep.
I lifted my face.
The man turned fully toward me, and his gray-blue eyes widened.
His dark brown hair was cut shorter than I remembered, and there was light stubble along his jaw, but the small pale scar near his right eyebrow was unchanged.
He looked at me as though the marble beneath his shoes had disappeared.
"CLARA? IS THAT REALLY YOU?!"
My knees weakened.
The ballroom contracted to the impossible distance between us.
"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE DEAD!"
I had meant to scream, but the words came out broken.
The blonde woman tried to reclaim his arm.
"Gabriel, what is this?" she asked, and the use of his name told me that at least one person in this room knew him by the name on my certificate.
He barely heard her.
His gaze moved over my face, stopping at a little dimple in my left cheek that appeared whenever I fought tears.
"Clara," he breathed again.
I wanted to touch him, but my body remembered the coffin and refused to move.
The blonde stepped in front of him.
"WHO THE HELL IS SHE?!"
He pulled free of her grasp.
"SHE'S MY WIFE!"
The string quartet stopped playing.
Somewhere behind me, a guest's phone clicked into recording mode.
The woman in crimson—later I would learn her name was Vivienne Hart—looked from him to me with disbelief curdling into fury.
"You told me you had no wife," she said.
"I was told my wife died," Gabriel replied, so softly I wondered whether anyone else heard.
For one hopeful instant, that answer almost made sense.
Then the hotel manager charged toward me from the ballroom entrance.
Martin Keene was forty-five, slick-haired, and so concerned with keeping his wealthy guests pleased that he had once reprimanded me for speaking above a whisper.
He grabbed my upper arm hard enough to make me gasp.
"This employee has caused a disturbance," he announced, dragging me toward the exit.
I tried to pull away, but my legs were still shaking.
Gabriel intercepted him, gripped his wrist, and forced him to release me.
"GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY WIFE!"
Keene staggered backward and adjusted his gold name badge with trembling fingers.
Gabriel moved close enough that I could smell cedar cologne and spilled champagne.
That was when grief became anger.
He was standing here breathing while I had spent three years learning how to survive without him.
For three birthdays, I had bought no cake because the thought of celebrating felt like betrayal.
I had sold my engagement bracelet to pay medical bills after the estate accounts froze.
I had lost the house because his business partner claimed the mortgage was secured against a corporate loan.
At his grave, I had told him things I could never bear to tell another person.
And now he was here, defending me from strangers as if he had merely been delayed at an airport.
"How?" I asked him.
"I don't know everything," he said.
That answer frightened me more than a lie might have.
I stepped away and felt the folded paper inside my apron.
I had carried it for months because an insurance clerk kept insisting the original record needed clarification.
I had planned to ask the city registrar about it after my next paycheck.
Instead I drew it out beneath the chandeliers.
The creases were nearly white from handling.
Gabriel watched me unfold it.
His full name stood beneath the official seal, followed by a date three years earlier and the words certifying death after a waterfront explosion.
He stared at the document as if it belonged to a stranger.
I pressed it against his champagne-stained chest.
"THEN WHO THE HELL DID I BURY THREE YEARS AGO?!"
No one spoke.
Not Vivienne, who had suddenly stopped breathing evenly.
Not Keene, who retreated toward the entrance.
Not the men whose phones had begun ringing beside the champagne display.
Gabriel held the paper with a trembling hand.
"I was told you were dead," he said.
My heart pounded painfully.
"Who told you?"
He looked over my shoulder toward a man standing beside the mirrored wall.
The stranger was middle-aged, silver-haired, and dressed in a tuxedo with a blue enamel pin.
He had been smiling through the entire gala.
He was no longer smiling.
May you like
"Victor Sloane," Gabriel whispered.
Before I could turn, the man disappeared behind a closing service door.
