Lying in that bed with a tube in my arm, I stopped not seeing.

And a woman who has finally decided to see everything is a far more dangerous thing than the people who put her in that bed had ever imagined.

Chapter 2 — The Marriage I Thought I Could Save

My name is Emma Parker.

I was twenty-eight years old, and until that afternoon I still believed my marriage could be saved.

We were not a happy couple, my husband and I, but we were not at war either.

Nathan Ashford ran one of the most powerful business groups in Dallas; I had left my own career in finance when we married, the way I had been gently encouraged to.

We had been together three years.

And the whole of the trouble between us had a name, and the name was Sabrina Kessler.

His first love.

The one everyone in his world agreed, in lowered voices, that he had never really gotten over.

That afternoon, Sabrina appeared at our house in tears, with a shallow scratch drawn across her forearm.

Nathan was beside me, and I remember the ordinary domesticity of it — he had been slicing an apple.

“Nate,” she wept, “I didn’t want to come here.