Chapter 1

My husband posted a poll in his family group chat asking whether he should stay with his pregnant wife or leave me for my pregnant best friend.

Everyone in the Pierce family already knew Ethan was cheating. They had helped him hide the affair, congratulated him on the other pregnancy, and voted as if my marriage were a game.

I did not even bother opening the poll results. I was already packing my things and preparing to file for divorce when Ethan dropped to his knees in front of me and slapped himself again and again.

"Claire, every single person voted for you. I swear on my life, if I ever betray you again, I'll die!"

I would never forgive a man who betrayed me.

After the divorce, I gave birth to our daughter, Sophie, and raised her alone. The court granted Ethan one supervised visit a month.

On the day of Sophie's kindergarten family outing, Ethan and I took her camping. I fell asleep in a hammock and had a vision.

On Sophie's sixth birthday, Ethan used his monthly visitation to take us hiking out of town. While Sophie and I posed for a picture, he shoved us off a cliff.

Our bodies shattered on the rocks below.

He cut out Sophie's heart and rushed it to a private surgical suite, all to give his son one last chance at life.

The transplant succeeded. Afterward, the five members of his happy family sat down together for a celebratory dinner.

My little girl was left cut open in the wilderness beside me. Our bodies rotted where no one would find us.

The cruelest part was that the boy Ethan had murdered two people to save was not even his biological son.

I jerked awake as if someone had dragged me out of deep water. Sweat soaked my clothes, and I could barely breathe.

Not far away, Sophie sat on Ethan's shoulders, her laughter carrying across the clearing.

Cold sweat still beaded along my hairline.

Ethan charged toward me with Sophie perched high above him. "Coming in for a landing!"

He set her down and reached out with his sleeve to wipe my forehead.

"Why are you sweating so much? I hung the hammock in the shade on purpose."

I flinched away before I could stop myself. His voice trailed off.

Ethan lowered his hand and quickly smoothed his expression. "You never could handle the heat. Sophie's birthday is next month. How about I take you both up to the mountains where it's cooler?"

The mountains.

Every muscle in my body locked. I pulled Sophie tighter against me and forced myself to ask, "Which mountain?"

Ethan smiled. "Blackridge Mountain."

The same mountain where Sophie and I had died in my dream.

I scooped her into my arms and strode toward the car.

Ethan hurried after me, confused. "What's wrong, Claire? My mom is waiting at home to have dinner with Sophie."

The dream no longer felt random. I needed to get Sophie away from him.

I yanked open the car door. "Something came up at work."

From the back seat, Sophie pressed her face to the window. "Mommy, I only get to see Daddy and Grandma once a month. I don't want to go home yet."

The longing in her voice cut straight through me. She had no idea that the people she loved were waiting to kill her.

I drove straight to my older sister's house.

Megan opened the door, took one look at my face, and pulled me inside.

"Noah, take Sophie to your room and play with her."

Once the children were out of earshot, I looked at her gravely. "This is going to sound insane, but I have to find out if it's true."

I told her everything. By the time I finished, the color had drained from her face. She sprang from the couch and grabbed her phone.

"David knows the transplant system. He'll know whether any part of this makes sense."

Megan's husband was a cardiothoracic surgeon. He could not access a child's medical records just because we asked, but he knew where to look for information the family had made public.

Within an hour, Megan found a church fundraiser created by my former mother-in-law. The smiling boy in the photographs was Tyler Pierce, the baby Ethan's family had supposedly rejected in that poll six years earlier. Post after post documented his congenital heart defect, repeated hospitalizations, and failure to receive a donor match.

The newest update thanked supporters for helping the family reserve a private operating suite for a procedure on Sophie's sixth birthday.

David recognized the surgeon's name. Dr. Foster had once worked in transplant medicine but had lost his hospital privileges after an organ-allocation investigation. Whatever Ethan and Amber had arranged, it was not a lawful transplant.

Rage blurred my vision. "Those monsters really are planning to use my daughter."

Megan shoved the phone away as if it had burned her. "They've spent six years building a murder plan."

She seized my hand and pulled me toward the door. "Come on. We're going to the police right now."

I held her back. "We don't have any evidence. Going to the police now will only warn them."

"I need proof of everything they're planning. I want them trapped by their own crimes, and I want them to pay."

"And when Ethan thinks he's won, I'm going to tell him the boy he sacrificed everything to save belongs to another man. Then I'll watch them tear each other apart."