Chapter 1
It was Christmas Eve, and a blizzard screamed outside the window. The mercury hit ten below.
My husband, Richard Grant, snatched our daughter—burning up with a hundred-and-four-degree fever—and shoved her into the drifts.
Vanessa Cole, Richard's high school flame, reclined on the sofa, popping chocolate truffles and purring.
"Richard, your kid's hacking is driving me crazy. My son can't get any rest with that racket," Vanessa complained.
I collapsed to my knees, begging Richard to crack the door, but he spun around and backhanded me across the face.
"Vanessa's boy has a heart condition, and he doesn't need the stress!" Richard barked.
I threw myself against the wood, listening to my daughter's whimpers fade into the wind.
Richard grabbed a roll of duct tape from the drawer and smothered my screams.
He wrenched my arms back, cinching my wrists to the radiator pipes.
"A night in the cold will toughen her up," Richard snarled. "She's fine!"
Three hours later, the scratching at the door stopped—silence swallowed the porch.
*****
I pressed my ear against the drywall, aching for any sign of life from the porch.
The silence was absolute.
The tiny voice that had shrieked, "Mommy, help!" and "Daddy, it's cold!" had been swallowed by the wind.
Three hours ago, my little Lily was a furnace of fever and exhaustion, her lungs rattling with a cough that tore me apart.
Vanessa had marched into the foyer with her brat, Max, in tow. Max scowled and groaned, "That noise is making my head hurt."
Vanessa's eyes welled with fake tears as she gripped Richard's arm. "Richard, you know Max's heart can't take the stress. Is Lily doing this on purpose just to make us feel unwelcome?"
That was all the fuel he needed.
Richard grabbed Lily—clinging to her thin cotton nightgown—and hurled her into the zero-degree whiteout like a bag of trash.
Now, Richard sat on the leather sofa, blowing on a mug of hot cocoa topped with marshmallows for Max.
The furnace was roaring, and Vanessa reclined in my lace negligee, her bare legs stretched out with a smirk of pure victory.
"Richard, nobody makes hot chocolate as sweet as yours," Vanessa cooed.
Richard tapped her nose with a playful grin. "Is Max finished? You want another cup, buddy?"
Max hammered away at Lily's iPad, not even looking up as he kicked over the Lego fortress on the rug.
Lily had spent the entire afternoon building that castle.
"This place sucks! I hate this house. Pops, when are you tossing that brat for good? I want the master suite!" Max demanded.
Richard chuckled and tousled the boy's hair. "Give it time, Max. Whatever you want, you get."
The duct tape choked my screams into pathetic, muffled whimpers of agony.
My tear ducts had finally run dry.
Richard finally acknowledged I was in the room, his lip curling in pure revulsion.
"Give it a rest, Helen. It's been three hours—the brat's learned her lesson. Go out there and drag her in. She's saying sorry to Vanessa and Max the second she walks through that door."
He stalked over, ripped the tape from my mouth in one jagged motion, and sliced the zip-ties biting into my wrists.
Raw, blackened welts circled my skin, a sight that would make a paramedic gag.
I blocked out the agony, scrambling and tripping toward the foyer.
The deadbolt was frozen solid, and my mangled hands fumbled uselessly against the cold brass.
"Useless," Richard hissed.
He shoved me into the drywall, stepped over me, and cranked the handle.
The sub-zero gale screamed into the house, slicing through the air like a butcher's blade.
I lunged onto the porch, collapsing into the drifts.
"Lily! Lily, baby!" I cried.
The snow across the lawn had already buried the flowerbeds.
Right at the base of the stairs, a small heap sat motionless, looking like a discarded doll left out by a careless child.
A heavy shroud of white covered every inch of her.
Like a woman possessed, I clawed through the powder, my fingers shaking as I cleared the frost from her face.
Lily's eyelids were sealed tight, her lashes rimmed with crystalline ice. The face that had been a fevered crimson hours ago was now a mottled, bruised violet.
"Lily, Mommy's here. I've got you, baby..." I murmured.
I pulled her against my chest.
She felt weightless in my embrace.
Light as a feather—as if she could just drift off into the storm.
But the true terror was the rigor setting into her tiny limbs.
She was solid and frozen, like a block of ice—no heat, no heartbeat, nothing.
I pressed a shaking finger just beneath her nostrils.
Nothing. Not a ghost of a breath.
A jagged, guttural howl tore from my throat, shattering the frozen air.
Richard stood framed in the doorway, his forehead creased with pure irritation.
"Helen, knock it off. What's with the theatrics at midnight? If you trigger Max's arrhythmia, do you have any idea what those hospital bills will cost?"
Vanessa drifted out wrapped in a cashmere throw, leaning into Richard's side with a smirk. "Seriously, Helen, stop being so dramatic. It was a little time-out.
"Back at boarding school in the mountains, they made us take ice-water showers in January. Kids are just soft these days."
Clutching Lily's stiff, frozen body—hard as a piece of timber—I forced myself to stand in the drifts.
I pivoted, locking my gaze onto the two of them.
My eyes were dead, like a ghost in a horror flick that had just crawled out of a shallow grave.
"Richard," I called out.
My voice was a wrecked, hollow rasp, every syllable dripping with agony.
"Lily is dead," I said.