Chapter 1 - The Child Who Wouldn’t Stop Watching Nora
By the time Lily Carter was six, she had already learned something most children should never have to learn: when adults smiled too sweetly, danger could be hiding right behind their teeth.
She was a petite little girl with light-brown hair, soft brown eyes, and a pale-pink dress she loved because her late mother had once called it her “brave dress.” Lily wore it on the days she needed courage most.
And lately, she needed courage often.
She lived in a sprawling mansion outside Charleston with her father, Daniel Carter, and his new wife, Nora.
Daniel loved his daughter fiercely. No one who saw them together could doubt that. But Daniel had one weakness: he believed that if he worked hard enough and loved deeply enough, he could fix any broken thing in his life.
That included his second marriage.
At first, Nora had seemed polished, patient, and elegant—blonde hair always pinned in a neat low bun, soft ivory dresses, perfect posture, calm voice. She had entered Daniel’s world like a woman who knew exactly how to play the role everyone expected of her.
But children were harder to fool than adults.
Lily noticed how Nora’s smile disappeared the second Daniel turned his back.
She noticed how Nora never forgot to serve Daniel first.
And she noticed something else too—
Nora watched Daniel’s food with a kind of nervous intensity that made Lily uneasy long before she understood why.
One week before everything exploded in the dining room, Lily saw Nora standing alone in the kitchen at night, staring down at a plate of cookies cooling on a tray.
Nora didn’t hear the child padding toward the doorway.
Lily saw her do something strange.
She took a tiny glass vial from the pocket of her dress, tilted it, and let a sticky clear substance drip onto one of the cookies. Then she carefully moved that cookie onto a separate plate and covered it.
Lily didn’t understand what she had seen.
But she understood one thing perfectly.
It was a secret.
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And Nora did not want anyone to know.
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