The first few days after the transfusion were a blur. I was weak, dizzy, and kept in a hospital room that was nicer than any apartment I’d ever lived in. Edward Caldwell—Mr. Caldwell—was a different man. The cold, distant billionaire who never saw me was gone. In his place was a man who looked at…

My body locked. Panic, cold and sharp, seized my throat. Andrew Collins. Here. Now. I heard the heavy, impatient footsteps on the marble staircase. He wasn’t supposed to be here. The nannies had said tomorrow. “Where is he?” His voice was a low growl, echoing in the cavernous hall. It was the voice of a…

The silence that followed the carriage’s departure was not empty. It was heavy, deep, and absolute—a vacuum that pulled all the warmth from Ellie’s small body. The sound of the hooves, the crunch of the wheels, the jingle of the harness… all of it was swallowed by the pines, one by one, until the only…

My mind struggled to process what I was seeing. This couldn’t be real. This was Westbrook, my estate. The gates were a quarter-mile down the drive. The security was biometric. Children didn’t just appear on my doorstep like phantoms, especially not barefoot, bleeding children in the middle of a deluge. My first, cynical thought—the one…

My name is Lila Monroe. I was twenty-five years old when I died. I am not telling you this for pity. Pity is a useless, cold coin that buys nothing. I am telling you this because, to understand the miracle, you must first understand the cold. And it was cold. Minneapolis in February is a…

I shoved the apartment door open. The living room was gone. It was just a wall of orange and black, a roaring, living, angry beast of a sound that deafened me. I couldn’t go that way. “EMMA!” I screamed again, the name tearing a raw hole in my throat. And I heard it. A whimper….

Chapter 2: The Roar of a Father   My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. The sleek, silent power of the Tesla felt absurdly inadequate, a sluggish beast against the frantic, roaring urgency pounding in my chest. Grace’s voice replayed in my head, high-pitched, trembling, laced with a terror that bypassed all my carefully…

The snow wasn’t soft. It was glass. It sliced the air and stung my cheeks, which didn’t feel like my cheeks anymore. They felt like stone. I was curled on the porch, a small, tight ball, trying to keep any part of me from touching the wood. The wood was the enemy. It had teeth…

My hands weren’t shaking. Not yet. They were just tired, cramped from 16 hours of clutching a pen, of tapping on a laptop 30,000 feet over the Pacific. Sixteen days in Singapore. Sixteen days of closing a deal that would add another nine figures to my net worth. I was Alexander Westbrook. I built empires….

Chapter 2: The Phone Call That Changed Everything   His words – “People like you never pay anyway” – hung in the sterile air, colder than the antiseptic smell, sharper than any scalpel. People like you. He didn’t know me. He didn’t know the fierce love that made my heart pound against my ribs as…

My cellmate, a kid named Leo, was perched on the top bunk, his knees drawn to his chest. He was barely twenty, all nervous energy and bad, stick-and-poke tattoos that told a story of bad decisions. He watched me as I entered, his eyes wide. I ignored him. I went to the small, stainless-steel sink…

Chapter 2: The Man in the Suit   He knelt, right there on the dirty sidewalk, the knees of his fancy dark pants getting wet from the slushy grime. Grown-ups didn’t usually kneel to talk to me, unless they were yelling. But his eyes… they weren’t angry like Mr. Reynolds’s. They weren’t full of pity…