Collin Samantha Casey

Holding my daughter’s cold body, I walked into the church’s baptismal pool as the congregation gathered for morning prayer. They thought I had lost my mind, that I was staging a blasphemous suicide to protest God’s injustice. My husband, Caleb—the celebrity pastor who had sacrificed our daughter on a frozen mountaintop to prove his devotion—thought so, too. He thought this was the end of the tragedy. He was wrong. It was the beginning of my reckoning. With an ally’s help, I faked my death. An unidentified woman’s body took my place. Five years later, I was an investigative journalist with a modest but growing reputation in Austin. He had squandered his fortune and searched for me like a madman, desperate for a single word of forgiveness to save his collapsing soul. After my new book launch, he cornered me, dropped to his knees, and sobbed out his repentance. He thought finding me would bring him redemption. He didn’t know I had only come back to tell hi......

My benefactor, Caspian Van Vanderbilt, once personally lifted me onto the throne of Juilliard. When I sprained my wrist, he marshaled his family’s private doctors to watch over me all night. When I was crippled by anxiety before a competition, he arranged for the best therapist in New York. He spent a fortune on recitals for me, allowing a girl from the Brooklyn slums to appear in the arts section of *The New York Times*. He pulled me from the mud and showed me heaven. Until the night of the foundation gala, when I worked up the courage to confess my love for him. Overnight, heaven became hell. He called my love “cheap ambition that defiles my kindness.” Then, under the pretext of a “reevaluation,” he sent me to a notorious “Endurance Camp” in the Utah desert. At the bottom of the file was his cold command: “You may return when you’ve learned gratitude instead of delusion.” In the first week, my long hair was shaved off because I’d hidden a piece of ......