Chapter 1 - THE GIRL WHO BAKED THROUGH HEARTBREAK
Iris Sullivan had spent most of her life surviving on things other people threw away—old uniforms, secondhand textbooks, forgotten opportunities, and the vague fragments of a childhood she could no longer remember.
After a car accident when she was seven, Iris had awakened in a hospital with no memory of her family and no clue about the strange crescent-shaped birthmark on her wrist. With nobody coming forward to claim her, she was eventually raised in an orphanage.
But Iris possessed two gifts.
She could design extraordinary medical technology.
And she could bake.
At prestigious Archer High School, where wealthy students barely noticed her, Iris sold homemade cookies for five dollars to raise money for school supplies and a design competition. She had secretly created an innovative pacemaker prototype—but instead of submitting it under her own name, she planned to allow her boyfriend of three years, Ian Kensington, to claim the project.
Iris believed Ian loved her.
Her best friend Ethan believed Ian was using her.
Rumors already linked Ian to wealthy Isabella Morgan, the daughter of a powerful education executive, but Iris refused to believe that the boy she had supported for years would betray her.
Then Victoria Archer arrived at the school.
Victoria was the billionaire CEO of Archer Group, the woman whose name appeared on universities, hospitals, scholarships, and research centers across the country.
Twenty years earlier, Victoria had suffered a tragedy no amount of money had ever repaired.
Her young daughter had disappeared.
When Victoria noticed Iris selling cookies in the courtyard, something about the girl unsettled her.
Iris felt the same strange pull.
Neither woman understood why.
Not yet.
May you like
Then Victoria approached the cookie table.
And one bite was about to reopen a mystery buried for twenty years.
