He framed me for his mistress’s miscarriage, but the moment she confessed six years later, he saw the horrific scars his silence caused.

Two weeks passed.

My hands grew blistered and raw from twelve-hour shifts at Maeve’s Diner, but I didn't mind. The rhythm of physical labor was grounding. Scrape the plate, rinse, scrub, rack, slide into the commercial sanitizer. Repeat three hundred times a night.

At 3:00 AM on a rainy Tuesday, the brass bell above the diner door jingled.

I was wiping down the laminate counter with a rag smelling of bleach. The diner was empty except for a lone truck driver snoring over a mug of black coffee in the corner booth.

The man who stepped through the door did not belong in this part of Queens.

He wore a bespoke charcoal wool overcoat that cost more than Maeve’s entire business. Raindrops glistened on his broad shoulders and slicked his dark hair back from his sharp, aristocratic brow. He carried an air of chilling power that sucked all the oxygen out of the cramped, greasy room.

Daniel.

My fingers locked around the bleach rag. My breath hitched in my throat, a violent wave of panic surging from my gut straight to my heart. For a second, the neon glow turned red, and I was back in the recreation yard, surrounded by women sharpening toothbrushes against the concrete.

*Stay still,* I told myself. *If you run, the dogs will tear you apart.*

Daniel’s gray eyes swept the diner, landing on me. A flash of shock—and something sickeningly close to horror—rippled across his handsome face.

I knew what he saw.

I was twenty pounds underweight. My cheekbones jutted out like knives beneath pale, paper-thin skin. My brown hair was chopped short, unevenly hacked off with safety scissors in the prison washroom to keep lice away. I wore an oversized gray t-shirt stained with tomato sauce and dish soap, and my apron was frayed at the waist.

"Clara," he whispered, his voice cracking slightly.

I looked down at the counter and continued wiping the same four inches of laminate in slow, circular motions.

"Diner closes in ten minutes," I said. My voice was level, completely drained of inflection. "Coffee's old. Pie's stale."

Daniel took two long strides toward the counter. He stopped just across from me, separated only by two feet of sticky Formica. "What are you doing here?"

"Working."

"Working?" His voice rose, an edge of incredulous fury breaking through his composed exterior. "You're washing dishes in a rat-trap in Queens? I left you a four-thousand-square-foot penthouse on 5th Avenue! I gave you an unlimited account! And you throw it in the river to sleep on potato sacks?"

"I don't like heights," I said quietly, dipping the rag into a bucket of gray water.

Daniel reached out, grabbing my wrist. "Look at me when I'm speaking to you, Clara!"

The moment his skin touched mine, my body reacted before my mind could intervene.

A strangled gasp ripped from my throat. I yanked my hand back with violent force, knocking the metal bucket off the counter. It hit the linoleum with an ear-splitting crash, dirty, sudsy water splashing across Daniel's five-thousand-dollar Italian leather shoes.

I backed up until my spine slammed into the stainless-steel grill hood. I raised both arms defensively over my head, ducking my chin, curling into the fetal posture that every inmate learned by heart if they wanted to survive the night.

"Don't hit," I whispered, the words spilling out uncontrollably. "Please. I took count. I was in my bunk. Don't hit."

Daniel froze.

His hand remained suspended in the air, his fingers curled into the empty space where my wrist had been. He stared at me cowering against the stove, trembling uncontrollably, waiting for a beating.

"Clara..." The anger drained out of his voice, replaced by something jagged and bewildered. "I... I wasn't going to hit you. I’ve never laid a hand on you."