Chapter 1
"My husband shoved me off an icy cliff when I was nine months pregnant because he wanted the $50 million life insurance payout, then stood at my funeral beside his mistress pretending I was already buried. What Brandon didn’t know was that neither his wife nor his unborn son was in that coffin, and while he celebrated becoming a wealthy widower, I was fighting my way back to expose him.
I remember the moment his hand hit my back.
One second, I was begging Brandon to take me home. The next, my boots slipped from the frozen edge of a cliff in Glacier National Park.
I screamed his name.
He didn’t reach for me.
He smiled.
“You and the baby won’t suffer long.”
Then I fell.
My body slammed onto a narrow ledge below. Pain exploded through my ribs and hip, but my hands immediately covered my stomach.
“Please,” I whispered to my baby. “Stay with me.”
Snow buried my coat as the wind tore through the mountains.
Then I heard voices above.
A woman.
Gretchen.
Brandon’s “executive assistant.”
“Is she dead?” she asked.
Brandon laughed softly.
“For fifty million dollars, she better be.”
I stopped breathing.
Suddenly, the romantic winter trip made sense. The isolated trail. His insistence that we hike despite the weather. The enormous insurance policy he’d convinced me to update months earlier.
My husband hadn’t lost his temper.
He had brought me there to murder me.
Eventually, their voices disappeared.
They left me to freeze.
For nearly two hours, I drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time darkness pulled at me, I pressed my palm against my stomach.
Then I felt it.
A kick.
My son was alive.
So I fought.
One breath.
Then another.
Until a beam of light swept across the snow.
Rotors thundered overhead.
A rescue helicopter appeared through the storm, and a man descended toward me on a cable.
When he reached the ledge, he checked my pulse, then my stomach.
“Ma’am, stay with me.”
I grabbed his jacket.
“My husband did this.”
His eyes sharpened.
“Your husband?”
“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t tell him I survived.”
The rescuer stared at me for one long second.
Then his radio crackled.
“Command says the husband already reported her dead.”
My blood turned cold.
Brandon wasn’t waiting for rescuers to find my body.
He was already building the story of my death.
I closed my eyes and made the first decision of my new life.
“Then let him keep believing it.”
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Because if Brandon wanted a funeral, I was going to give him one.
And when I came back, I wanted to see his face when the dead woman walked through the door.
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