Chapter 1 - THE WOMAN BEHIND THE LOCKED DOOR
Claire Donovan, a divorced maid raising her seven-year-old daughter Lucy outside Philadelphia, secretly discovers an elderly woman imprisoned inside the supposedly abandoned east wing of Mafia Boss Gabriel Moretti’s mansion. The woman claims that her son believes she has been dead for eleven years and gives Claire a wedding ring as proof of her identity.
Days later, Gabriel’s fiancée, Vanessa Crowley, catches Claire bringing food and mysterious pills to the hidden woman. Vanessa slaps Claire and threatens Lucy, unaware Gabriel is watching. Gabriel recognizes the wedding ring hanging from Claire’s neck as the ring supposedly buried with his mother, Teresa Moretti.
When Gabriel investigates, the elderly woman has vanished. Inside the empty room he discovers a ceramic bird he made for his mother as a child. His uncle Arthur—the same man who identified Teresa’s burned body eleven years earlier—appears terrified.
Tests reveal the pills Claire had been carrying are powerful sedatives.
During Gabriel and Vanessa’s engagement celebration, a recording of Teresa suddenly plays throughout the mansion. She claims Gabriel’s father did not die accidentally and says the guilty person has been sitting at Gabriel’s table for eleven years.
Then Gabriel receives a phone call.
Teresa is alive.
But instead of telling Gabriel where she is, she gives him a warning:
“Don’t trust the woman standing beside you.”
Claire is the only woman beside him.
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Then Teresa delivers an even more disturbing message.
“Ask Claire why her daughter has the Moretti birthmark.”
