My husband, Ethan, killed our daughter. Not with a knife, but with a pen. With a single stroke, he signed the consent form that turned my seven-year-old daughter, Daisy, into a living blood bank and bone marrow reserve for Seraphina, his late fraternity brother’s wife. And just because that woman was a widow, just because she wore a fragile, grief-stricken face, she was allowed to drain the life from my daughter without the slightest guilt. I fought him like a woman possessed, but he called me cold-blooded and jealous. He used the full power of his family, the university’s founders, to silence every doctor who might have listened to me. In front of the entire board of trustees, he publicly condemned my lack of compassion. Then he turned around and forced our daughter onto a cold operating table. He kept her there until her small body failed, until she died in a surgery meant to keep an outsider alive. Did you think I would scream and cry at her funeral, Ethan? I didn’t. I simply withdrew from my doctoral program, drove my car into the lake, and staged a perfect death for myself. You thought I was gone? No. Only “Clara Blackwood” died. The woman who survived, the history PhD Clara Weiss, has only one research topic now: writing you and your filthy family into a history of evil that will outlive us all. I will make you spend the rest of your life watching the legacy you treasured burn to ash before your very eyes. … The false smiles from the dinner party were still plastered on our faces when we got home. I slapped a medical report down on the oak desk in front of Ethan. “Mild anemia,” I said, my voice shaking with rage. “Ethan, this is from Seraphina’s own physician. She needs iron supplements, not the life of a seven-year-old girl!” Ethan didn’t even glance at the report. He just loosened his tie, his eyes raking over me with a scrutinizing, almost weary expression. “Clara, you’re being emotional.” “I’m ......
