Chapter 1

In the three years since I broke up with my childhood sweetheart, my mother had cooked every dish he ever loved.

I sat in my wheelchair without making a scene, without the hysterics she'd grown used to from me. That seemed to unsettle her more than anything. She kept circling back to the same warning:

"Zara, Lily and Bryce are very happy together. Don't go making yourself the problem. I can't afford that kind of embarrassment."

She had always been like this. Always on the side of everyone except her own daughter. Always treating me like a threat to be managed rather than a person to be loved.

Bryce had been mine first. We grew up next door to each other, practically from birth. He was the boy who reached for my hand on the way to school every morning, who kissed me under the old oak tree at the end of our street and told me he'd meant it, who swore he was going to marry me one day.

And then my mother — who taught at the local secondary school — took in Lily Forsythe.

From the day Lily walked through our front door, she inserted herself into everything. My mother was complicit in half of it. Wherever Bryce and I went — the library, the shops, a walk in the park — she made sure Lily came along. She'd even stood up at Bryce and Lily's wedding as a witness.

I tore open a bag of sour cream crisps and kept my eyes somewhere neutral.

"Mum," I said, "if you're that worried, why did you insist on dragging me home to recover?"

"Don't take that tone with me, you ungrateful —"

She raised her hand out of habit, aiming for my forehead. I tilted my head out of the way.

From outside came the beep of the keypad.

My mother's expression transformed. She rearranged her face into something warm and hurried to the door.