Chapter 1The Mistress Wore Stolen Couture

On my first day at the firm, an intern stood in the middle of the open-plan floor and pointed a trembling finger at my chest.

Her eyes were rimmed with red, brimming with well-rehearsed tears. "Why are you wearing my mother’s clothes?" she demanded, her voice cracking loud enough to stop every conversation in the room. "Why do you have her bag?"

The bullpen erupted in an instant.

"Did she raid the wife’s closet just to come here?" someone whispered, the hiss cutting through the air conditioning. "Is she trying to force his hand?"

In my previous life, I had choked on my own panic, pleading and scrambling to explain that those things belonged to my mother. Nobody believed me. They took stealth videos. They doxed me. They plastered my face across social media until the mob arrived at my doorstep, their hatred a suffocating wave that drowned me before my twenty-third birthday.

I died in the dark, shivering and alone.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the morning the lie began—the morning they branded me an executive's kept woman.

This time, my eyes stayed dry. I offered no panicked defense.

I simply pulled out my phone, dialed my mother’s private line, and tapped speakerphone.

"Mom," I said into the silence of the room. "There’s a girl here claiming I’m wearing her mother’s clothes and sneaking into her family’s estate." I paused, letting my gaze sweep over the slack-jawed faces around me. "Do you want to come down to headquarters and meet your daughter yourself?"

Two beats of complete stillness followed on the line.

Then, cool and immaculate, my mother’s voice filtered through the speaker:

"Put me on speaker."

* * *

In that past life, the internet had consumed me whole. The harassment had come in relentless swells—slurs painted on my building’s facade, death threats slipped under my door, strangers lurking on the street corners outside. Major depressive disorder settled into my bones like lead, and on my twenty-third birthday, my heart gave out under the weight of it all.

My mother never survived the grief of losing me. Her health crumbled, and she passed away within months.

With both of us gone, my father, Russell Harmon, smoothly ushered Suzanne Walsh—the mistress he had kept hidden for over twenty years—into the light. Suzanne’s daughter, Alyssa, shed her ordinary life overnight, transforming into the celebrated heiress of Sumner Enterprises. Even the empire my mother had built with her bare hands was carved up and swallowed by them.

When I opened my eyes this morning, the slate was clean.

I looked down at the bespoke charcoal wool suit hugging my shoulders, and the graphite Porosus crocodile tote resting beside my desk—a piece my mother hadn't carried in years.

In my last life, these two items were treated as undeniable proof of my shame.

In this life, they would be their casket.

The whispers had started the moment I stepped off the elevator on the thirty-second floor.

"Isn’t that tailored by a Parisian couture house? There's only one like it in the country."

"And that bag—it’s an auction piece. You can't just buy that with money; you need a pedigree."

"Is she some billionaire's kid doing a tour of the mailroom to build character?"

I hadn't even finished adjusting my desk chair when Alyssa walked over. She wore a tailored cream dress that screamed calculated innocence, deliberately projecting her voice so every corner of the room could hear.

"Why are you wearing my mother’s clothes? And carrying her bag?"

The room went dead silent. The clicking of mechanical keyboards ceased.

Alyssa’s eyes welled with tears, her lip quivering with an actress's precision. "That suit is one of a kind. And I’ve seen you—sneaking in and out of our house in Greenwich when you thought no one was watching. Are you really that proud of destroying another woman’s family?"