Chapter 1

I died under the champagne tower at my own company's IPO party -- and the hand that pushed me belonged to the little sister I'd protected my whole life. She leaned in, lips at my ear, and whispered, "Sis. Dad's money was always supposed to be mine."

Then the floor rushed up, glass came down like applause, and three hundred people screamed my name half a second too late.

In twenty-eight years, it was the most attention my family had ever paid me.

I opened my eyes.

Beige carpet. A coffee table with a water ring I knew by heart. My mother's reading glasses, folded on the arm of a couch we'd given away years ago.

This living room. The one that stopped existing the day my parents split.

I was twenty-four again. It was the day they made us choose.

"Are we boring you, Grace?"

My father, Jack sat across from the divorce attorney, papers fanned out like a card trick. My mother, Tegan, sat at the far end of the couch with her hands folded in her lap -- the way you sit when you've already decided not to cry in front of strangers.

"We've talked it through," Jack said, to no one. "It's cleaner if you girls decide now. Who you'll live with. Who you'll--" he hunted for the word like it cost money, "--stand with."

Chloe didn't let him finish. She crossed the room in three steps and tucked herself under his arm. "Daddy. Obviously you." A glance at our mother, quick and bright as a paper cut. "No offense, Mom. I just can't do the whole small-apartment thing."

In this house there was an arrangement. Jack didn't want the daughter who clung. He wanted the one whose name worked on a form, who handled things, who never made it weird.

He smiled at me, certain. "Grace is with me. Grace understands how the world works."

Last time, I'd been so grateful to be chosen. Last time, I'd spent the next eight years being useful, and I died for it on a staircase made of champagne.

I stood. Walked the length of the room. Past my father's open arm. And I sat down next to my mother.

"I'll go with Mom," I said.

The silence had a texture.

Chloe laughed first -- a startled little bark. "You're joking."

My father's certainty curdled into something colder. "Think very carefully, Grace."

"I did." I took my mother's hand. Her fingers were ice. "I'm done thinking, actually."

He let it go. He never fought when he could outlast you. "You'll be back," he said pleasantly. "You always come back, sweetheart. You don't know how to be anything but mine."

I filed that line away somewhere I could reach it later.

---

He found me alone in the hall an hour later. No raised voice. Jack saved his temper for people who couldn't be useful to him.

"Your mother's being unreasonable about the settlement," he said. "She'll listen to you. She always listens to you. Go in there and make her see sense -- take the smaller number, sign, save us all the lawyers." He squeezed my shoulder. "You're the sensible one. Do this for the family."

There it was. Not a slap. A job. Go break your own mother's heart, quietly, so I don't have to. He even said please.

Last time, I did it. I sat with my mother and talked her gently out of everything she was owed, and she signed, and she thanked me, and I never forgave myself.

"I'll talk to her," I said.

His shoulders dropped, relieved. Predictable as weather.