I was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for my billionaire adoptive father’s death. As the guards prepared to take me away, my mother-in-law pretended to cry while my husband gently rested his hand on his pregnant mistress’s belly. They believed they’d stolen my freedom and gained control of a nearly $5 billion empire. I simply smiled and revealed one name: “Clara Thorne.” My husband’s expression changed instantly. Seconds later, the prosecutor shouted, “Stop the transfer!” But the secret surrounding his first wife’s disappearance five years earlier was only the beginning…

*Clara Thorne**.

His first wife. The woman he had married when he was twenty-two, who had mysteriously vanished five years before he met me. Silas had always told everyone she was a flighty, manic-depressive artist who had abandoned him, emptied their joint checking account, and boarded a flight to Europe, never to be heard from again.

“What about her, Silas?” I asked, keeping my hand steady against the counter.

Silas’s smile stretched until it looked like a skull baring its teeth.

*”Clara wasn’t an artist, Eleanor. She was a licensed certified public accountant. Five years ago, while I was running my regional concrete firm in Lexington, she discovered I had diverted eight hundred thousand dollars from a state highway project into offshore sports-betting accounts in Costa Rica.”*

He paused, licking his dry lips, savoring the confession like fine wine.

*”She threatened to take the ledgers to the Kentucky Attorney General. She packed her bags. We had an argument in the kitchen of our family’s old abandoned farm outside Lexington. A very loud argument.”*