After a car hit me, I was lying in the hospital with serious injuries. Hours later, my husband burst into the room, yelling, “Enough with the drama! Get up and cook for my mom’s birthday.” I said nothing. He grabbed my arm, trying to drag me out of bed, complaining he wouldn’t waste money on my “fake illness.” Then the door opened—and he started shaking when he saw who walked in.

Chapter 1: The Accident and the Cold-Blooded

The sterile, blinding white lights of the hospital room hummed with a low, incessant vibration that seemed to synchronize perfectly with the throbbing agony in my chest.

Every single time I drew a shallow breath, it felt as though a serrated knife was dragging across my ribcage. The emergency room doctor had been clinical but gentle when he delivered the diagnosis: two fractured ribs on my right side, a severely sprained and swollen left knee, and a deep laceration across my forehead that had required eight stitches to close.

I was lucky to be alive. That’s what the paramedics had told me as they pulled me from the crumpled, smoking wreckage of my sedan. I had been driving through the intersection of 4th and Elm, completely possessing the right of way, when a heavy silver car blew straight through a solid red light and T-boned my driver’s side door with explosive, terrifying force. The impact had thrown my car into a spin, the airbags deploying violently in a cloud of white powder and the smell of burnt rubber.