Chapter 1 - THE FIRST MISTAKE
My name is Olivia Hayes.
I was twenty-eight years old, working as a housemaid in Luca Moretti’s mansion on Chicago’s North Shore because I needed every dollar the job paid.
My mother had died two years earlier, leaving medical bills behind. My younger brother was finishing community college, and I had promised him he wouldn’t sacrifice his future to help me survive.
So when I served Luca Moretti’s engagement dinner with my left eye swelling shut beneath my hair, I kept working.
Twenty-six guests sat beneath the chandeliers.
Luca noticed me before I made it around the table.
“Olivia. Look at me.”
Before I could answer, his fiancée, Vanessa Bellini, laughed.
“She hit her face on the pantry door.”
The problem was simple.
Luca hadn’t asked what happened yet.
Vanessa had answered anyway.
He questioned us quietly until our story collapsed. When he ordered me to move my hair, everyone saw the bruise covering my cheek.
I lied because Vanessa had threatened my job.
But Luca’s security cameras told another story.
At 3:49 that afternoon, Vanessa and a private investigator named William Mercer entered an upstairs guest room. Minutes later, I tried to leave. Vanessa grabbed me, and I fell against the doorframe.
Later, I admitted what I had overheard.
Vanessa had hired Mercer to photograph Luca and his former wife, Elena. She wanted Elena frightened into moving something she had secretly kept.
Then I gave Luca a photograph I had taken from the room.
It showed Elena outside a storage facility with Mercer six months earlier—long before Vanessa supposedly hired him.
Before Luca could understand why, his security chief called.
Mercer’s car had been found outside Elena’s building.
Vanessa had arrived there twenty minutes earlier.
But Vanessa was supposed to be upstairs in Luca’s mansion.
Then something vibrated inside my apron.
A tiny recorder.
Someone had slipped it there.
The recording had been made inside the guest room while Vanessa, Mercer, and I were there.
Luca pressed PLAY.
Vanessa’s frightened voice filled the study.
“Mercer, if Luca finds out what really happened to Elena’s father—”
A man interrupted her.
It wasn’t Mercer.
Luca went completely still.
May you like
Because he knew the voice.
And according to everyone in Chicago, the man speaking on that recording had been dead for eleven years.
