My dad angrily pushed me off the cruise ship into the ocean when he found out that my grandfather had left his entire $500 million estate to me in his will. My mother was laughing at the time. They thought I couldn’t swim—but they were wrong. When they arrived home, they began celebrating, only to be shocked to find so many strangers in the house.

Chapter 1: The False Dawn

I never imagined that the exact moment my entire reality fractured would be disguised as a breathtaking sunrise.

It was an early Tuesday morning, and the Atlantic Ocean was stretching long, shimmering veins of silver across its glass-like surface. The coastal breeze carried that unmistakable, pungent aroma of brine, decaying seaweed, and damp sand that I had inhaled every day of my life growing up in Charleston, South Carolina. Our family residence was a mere stone’s throw from the tideline—a sprawling, two-story wooden colonial painted a pristine white, adorned with powder-blue shutters and a wraparound porch whose floorboards groaned in protest every time a heavy wind swept off the water.

I had spent my childhood desperately trying to convince myself that the house was a sanctuary, simply because I needed a safe place to exist. But the truth was a jagged pill to swallow: the people living inside it were hollow. My parents possessed an immense, fierce capacity for love, but they reserved it exclusively for two things: each other, and their bank accounts. For as long as I could remember, I, Marissa Lane, had been nothing more than an inconvenient line item on their monthly budget. A piece of luggage they were forced to drag around.