Chapter 1
Three months after Stephen Foster threw me away, I died in a fire 2,000 miles from home.
That same day, Stephen married Emma Sutton, the one he had loved all along.
The Fosters threw a wedding so big it made the national news.
My ashes stayed behind in Dunmere, and for a long time nobody came to claim them.
Then one day Stephen asked his assistant, "Alysha still hasn't started begging to come home?"
For a full day after I died, nobody claimed my body.
The fire had started inside the apartment, and it took me with it.
The burns covered me head to foot, my face had gone unrecognizable, and it was not a pretty way to be found.
Plenty of people stopped to stare.
Only my landlady, whose memory had already started going, looked down at what was left of me and sighed, her eyes gone red.
My soul made the trip home alone, all 2,000 miles of it.
By the time I reached the gates of the Foster Estate, a wedding was in full swing inside.
Every seat was full, and the room had just hit its loudest, happiest moment.
Stephen held Emma's hand at the front of the room, looked at her like nothing else in the world existed, and dropped his voice low.
"I've got your hand now, and I'm not ever letting go of it."
He slid the diamond ring onto her finger.
Emma's whole face lit up, shy and glowing at the same time.
Then the whole room started cheering them on, and they kissed up on that stage like nobody else was watching.
Something went straight through my chest without any warning.
I looked down at my own bare ring finger.
Stephen had put that same diamond on my hand once.
He had sworn to me that we would grow old together and that he would never let me down.
I could still hear him saying it.
He had probably forgotten every word.
My hand went to my chest before I could stop it.
A hole ran clean through me there, and the wind came howling in from both sides.
I was dead, and it still hurt exactly the way it used to.
The reception ran late into the night.
Stephen had never been much of a drinker.
But he was happy that night, and for once he drank until it showed.
I didn't catch what the guests were teasing him about.
Emma went red to the ears and walked him upstairs to their room.
The night wore on, and the last of the guests cleared out soon after.
I couldn't follow them up there and listen to whatever came next.
Instead I sat out in the front yard, staring up at a moon that gave off nothing but cold white light.
I didn't want to stay in that house anymore.
The trouble was that I had nowhere else to go.
*****
I had followed Stephen to that house the year I turned 19.
My father had died only a few weeks before.
We buried him in a small rushed service, and then Stephen took my hand and brought me all the way to the Fosters.
I cried the entire way there.
I kept telling him, "My dad's gone. I don't have a home now, and I don't have anybody."
My mother and my grandparents had all died years earlier.
The rest of the relatives had drifted off long before that, so my dad was all I had.
Stephen closed my hand inside his and held on to it.
He was wearing the matching band on his own ring finger. Those were our engagement rings.
He talked me down the whole way there. "As long as I'm alive, Aly, you'll always have a home, and you'll always have family."
He told me the Fosters had more money than I could picture.
It would pay for the best ballet program in the country and any college I wanted.
He would buy me the prettiest dresses and every pair of pointe shoes I ever asked for.
What was I even thinking back then?
I thought that as long as Stephen stayed with me, I could give up everything else.
He was all I had left.
He said the Foster Estate was a good place for me, so I went where he took me.
I had been there less than a week when Emma showed up.
Right up until she walked in, Stephen had been the one promising to put me first and take care of me for the rest of my life.
He ran cold with everyone he met, and the second he laid eyes on Emma he couldn't look away.
Nobody had ever told me that long before he met me, Stephen had a girl he grew up with.
They had known each other since they were babies, and standing face to face after all those years apart, both of them teared up.
I was standing right next to Stephen, and for the first time he felt a hundred miles away.
I almost grabbed his sleeve and pulled him out of the room right then.
Then Emma noticed the ring on his hand and smiled up at him. "That's a beautiful ring, Stephen."
Stephen started twisting it off without a second of thought.
Then he paused, reached over, and pulled my hand toward him.
"Mine's a men's band. It'd slide right off you.
"This one's the match to it, so take this one instead."