Chapter 1 - The Curtain
The knife touched the curtain, and Mara finally understood that her husband had not come to save her.
“Daniel, don’t.”
Her voice came out small. Not dramatic. Not even angry. Just wrong, like it belonged to someone standing safely on the ground.
Two stories below, the stone terrace blurred in and out of focus. Mara’s left hand was wrapped in a fistful of gold curtain fabric that had ripped loose from the balcony door. Her right wrist burned where Teresa Morales, the Cross family’s sixty-eight-year-old housekeeper, clung to her with both hands.
“I won’t let go,” Teresa gasped.
Evelyn Cross stepped on Teresa’s bare foot.
Teresa cried out, but she did not release Mara.
“Mom, stop!” Mara screamed.
Evelyn pressed harder.
Then Daniel came through the doorway.
For one stupid second, relief hit Mara so hard she almost laughed.
“Daniel! Help me!”
He stared at her. His face was pale. His shirt was half buttoned, as if he had dressed too fast.
He did not move toward her.
He pulled a folding knife from his pocket.
Mara blinked.
“No.”
Daniel opened the blade.
“Mom is right,” he said.
Teresa looked over her shoulder. “You coward.”
Daniel flinched at that. A real flinch. Then he crouched beside the torn curtain and began sawing through it.
Mara’s mouth went dry.
“Do you also want to kill our baby?”
Daniel’s jaw tightened.
“That baby won’t inherit anything.”
The last strip of fabric snapped.
Mara dropped.
Teresa slid across the balcony floor with her, fingernails scraping against stone. Evelyn stumbled backward. Daniel lunged too late—or pretended to.
Mara hit something hard, then soft, then hard again.
A canvas awning over the breakfast terrace caught her for half a second before tearing down the middle. She rolled off it and crashed through a row of boxwoods.
Teresa came after her.
The old woman struck the edge of the awning frame, spun, and landed on the grass with a sound Mara would hear in her sleep for years.
For a moment, nobody moved.
Then Mara felt a warm rush between her legs.
She looked down.
Blood.
“No. No, no, no.”
Teresa lifted her head a few inches. “Mara.”
“I’m bleeding.”
Teresa tried to crawl toward her.
Above them, Evelyn’s face appeared over the railing.
Daniel stepped beside his mother.
Neither called an ambulance.
Mara reached for her phone. It was gone.
Then a lawn mower engine cut off somewhere beyond the hedges.
A man shouted, “Mrs. Cross?”
Daniel vanished from the railing.
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And Mara heard him say, very clearly, “Tell them she jumped.”
