Chapter 1 — The Room Where They Thought I Was Sleeping

“If Genevieve walks into that wedding clear-eyed and well, Sabrina will never be able to take her place.”

I heard that sentence a week before I was supposed to marry Christian Prescott — one of the most famous pop artists in the country — while I lay still in a private suite at a wellness clinic outside Columbus, letting the whole world believe I was asleep.

I had been checked in three days earlier for what Christian’s team called “exhaustion” and “pre-wedding stress,” a plausible enough story that I had almost believed it myself; I had, after all, been strangely tired for weeks, worn thin in a way I could not name.

It was only later, listening in that dim room, that I understood the exhaustion had been arranged as carefully as everything else.

I kept my breathing slow and even.

And I listened to the man I was about to marry explain, in a voice of terrible calm, exactly what I was and had always been to him — which was not, it turned out, the love of his life.

I was the alibi.

I have gone back, since, to those weeks of exhaustion, and I understand them now in a way I could not then, and the understanding still makes me cold.

Because I was not imagining the tiredness.

It was real.

But it had been arranged — the schedule packed until I had no hours to think, the small constant corrections to my confidence, the way every worry I raised was met with such gentle concern that I began to feel the worry itself was the problem.

A person can be worn down without a single blow, simply by being managed, and I had been managed with genuine artistry.

By the time Christian’s team suggested, so kindly, that I seemed overwhelmed, that perhaps I needed rest, that a quiet clinic before the wedding might do me good, I had been softened into agreeing that yes, something was wrong with me, that I was fragile, that I needed looking after.

That was the genius of it, and the horror.

They did not have to make me unwell.

They only had to make me believe I was, and then offer, tenderly, to take care of the woman they had convinced me I had become.

I walked into that clinic on my own two feet, grateful for the rest, thanking the people who were caging me.