“I do not want you as my mom!” six-year-old Ben Whitmore screamed, hurling his fork onto the polished dining-room floor. “I want Aunt Molly. She lets me have chocolate for breakfast.”
Chapter 1
Across the table, thirteen-year-old Ethan lowered his eyes and went perfectly still. My mother-in-law, Evelyn, pressed a hand to her pearls, while my husband’s empty chair stood at the head of the table like a monument to every bad decision this family had ever made. Grant Whitmore had been missing at sea for two months, presumed dead, and apparently the greatest emergency in his absence was that I had put broccoli on a child’s plate.
There was only one problem with the scene. I wasn’t the Julia Whitmore they thought I was.
The night before, I had been a sixty-two-year-old retired accountant named Susan Bell, sitting in my recliner in Cleveland and rage-reading a ridiculous romance novel called The Stepmother Must Lose. Somewhere around two in the morning, after shouting, “Nobody with a functioning brain would sign that contract,” I had apparently died. I woke that morning in Julia’s thirty-five-year-old body, inside the very novel that had annoyed me to death.
And according to the book, Julia was doomed.
She was supposed to spoil Ben, neglect Ethan, cling desperately to Grant, surrender control of the family company to Grant’s crooked uncle, and lose every argument to Molly Bennett, Grant’s childhood friend. Eventually Julia would be blamed for everything, thrown out of the family’s Rhode Island estate, and die alone while everybody else spent another three hundred pages being wealthy and emotionally incompetent.
I picked up Ben’s fork.
“Listen carefully, young man,” I said. “Aunt Molly is not your mother. Chocolate is not breakfast, forks are not airplanes, and your brother is not your punching bag.”
Ben stared at me as if the broccoli had started speaking.
“I’m telling Dad.”
“Excellent. When your father finishes pretending to be a luxury ghost and comes home, I’ll put broccoli on his plate too.”
Evelyn gasped. “Julia!”
“Evelyn, if you frighten the vegetables, they’ll never cooperate.”
A strange voice chimed inside my head.
Stepmother route deviation detected.
I smiled.
“Good.”
Then the front door opened.
Every person in the dining room froze.
A tall man stood beneath the chandelier, rain dripping from a black coat onto the marble floor. His face was leaner than the photographs, his dark hair was wet, and he looked like a man who had survived the Atlantic only to return home and discover that civilization had collapsed over steamed vegetables.
Grant Whitmore was alive.
Ben flew from his chair. “Dad!”
Grant caught him with one arm, but his eyes stayed on me.
“Dad,” Ben said urgently, “Mom threatened me with broccoli.”
“Tiny broccoli,” I said. “Let’s be accurate before witnesses.”
Grant stared at the vegetable, the fork on the floor, then at Ethan, who had not moved from his chair.
“What happened while I was gone?”
I lifted my water glass.
“How much time do you have?”
Evelyn made a faint choking noise.
I continued. “Your son learned that sugar is a constitutional right. Your nephew learned to apologize for breathing. Molly apparently has unrestricted access to this house. Your mother has weaponized chest-clutching. And your Uncle Raymond tried to steal your voting shares this afternoon.”
Grant’s expression changed instantly.
“Raymond was here?”
“He was. I gave him coffee before destroying his afternoon.”
Grant stepped toward the study.
I raised one finger. “No dramatic storming off until you eat.”
His eyes narrowed. “Julia.”
“Grant. You disappeared for two months. I have been running this family for nine hours. I’m exhausted.”
Ethan made a small sound.
A laugh.
He immediately looked ashamed of it.
I pointed at him. “No. Head up. In this house, innocent people do not apologize because louder people are uncomfortable.”
Something passed across Ethan’s face that hurt me more than I expected.
Grant saw it too.
Ben tugged his father’s sleeve. “Do I really have to eat the tree?”
Grant looked at me.
Then he looked at his son.
“Yes.”
Ben’s mouth dropped open. “The ocean changed you.”
“No,” I said. “Dinner changed him.”
For the first time, Grant almost smiled.
Then the family lawyer appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Whitmore,” Diane Mercer said, holding a tablet. “You need to see what we found.”
Grant’s face hardened.
Diane glanced at me before continuing. “The documents Mrs. Whitmore intercepted this afternoon weren’t merely an attempt to transfer voting control. We found shell companies, hidden payments, and falsified safety reports connected to the private route your boat took the night you disappeared.”
The room went silent.
Grant slowly turned toward me.
And I realized the stupid novel had hidden something even I hadn’t known.
Someone hadn’t simply expected Grant to die.
Someone had planned for it.
