Delaney Hulton Alena

I signed my own death certificate. I just didn't know it yet. The pen was warm from my husband's hand. The ink was still wet on the line that said Caroline Vance—voluntary transfer of all assets. And the woman standing behind him, the one with my old necklace around her throat, was smiling like she'd already won. She had. "You're doing the right thing, sweetheart," Daniel said, sliding the documents into his briefcase. "The doctors think the stress is bad for you. Better to keep things simple while you recover." Recover. From an illness I didn't have until I started drinking the "vitamin smoothies" he handed me every single morning for eight months. I should have noticed sooner. The shaking hands. The fog in my head. The way I couldn't remember my own mother's birthday anymore. I should have noticed her—Sienna, my best friend, my maid of honor—who suddenly knew where Daniel kept the spare reading glasses, who finished his sentences, who flinched whenever I walked into a room too quietly. I noticed everything the night I couldn't sleep and went downstairs for water. Their voices floated up from his study. The door was cracked. "The toxicology won't show anything after she's gone," Sienna whispered. "You're sure?" "Three more weeks of the supplement," Daniel said, calm as a man discussing the weather. "Her liver's already failing. The will leaves everything to me. Then we make it official." "And the baby?" A pause. Then his hand—I could hear it—resting on her stomach. "He'll grow up with everything that should've been hers." I didn't drop the glass. I want you to know that. My hands had been shaking for months, but in that moment they went perfectly still. Because the woman who married Daniel Vance with stars in her eyes—she died right there in the hallway. The woman who walked back upstairs was someone he'd very much regret creating. I climbed into bed beside the man who was poisoning me, and I let him kiss my forehead. "Goodnight, Caro," he murmured. "Goodnight," I whispered back. Tomorrow, I would start dying on my own terms. And then I would come back and bury them both.