Chapter 1 — Waking in the Alley

“If you ever ask about that trust fund again, I swear to God you’ll regret the day you were born.”

Those were the last words I heard from my father before the world went dark.

And when it came back, I was lying on cold pavement behind a grocery store, barefoot, my clothes torn, my whole body aching so badly I could barely draw a breath.

My name is Daniela Rios.

I was thirty-four years old, and until that night, I had believed that whatever else my family was, however difficult, however cold, they would never be capable of what they had just done to me.

I lay there in the dark, the pavement pressing into my back, the rumble of distant delivery trucks echoing somewhere beyond the alley, and I tried to push myself up, and a blinding pain shot through my ribs and stopped me.

I raised a hand to my face and felt dried blood at my eyebrow.

I had no purse.

No phone.

No wallet.

Not even shoes.

For a few disoriented, terrified seconds, I thought I had been mugged and left for dead by a stranger.

I will not describe the state I was in beyond this, because the details of what was done to my body that night belong to me and not to any page; it is enough to know that I was badly hurt, and alone, and freezing, and that I had no idea, yet, that this was not a random crime at all, but the deliberate act of the two people who were supposed to love me most in the world.

And then, slowly, through the concussion and the cold, the memory of how I had gotten there began to return.

Chapter 2 — The Memories

It came back in fragments, the way trauma does.

My father’s study, in our family home in Greenwich.