I added a swipe of lip gloss and smacked my lips together. Touched up my mascara, though my lashes didn’t need it. One time I had been offered an acting gig because I reminded the casting director of Rihanna. I possessed that “wow factor,” he explained. I could only assume it was the hazel green eyes that you rarely saw on a Black person. Well, mixed, in every sense of the word. My whole life I hung on the outskirts. Too poor for the cool cliques. Too white for the girls in the hood. Too black for the white-bread suburbanites. I felt like a puzzle piece that never quite fit.

I still did. Until I met the Portman family.

The family that I singlehandedly targeted and unintentionally destroyed.

Slowly making my way down the stairs, I winced with each step as my tailbone pulsed in pain. At the foot of the stairs Cody waited for me.

“You look hot, babe.” He paired it with a devilish grin.

If only all of this was for him.

“You too.” I turned around as my adoring husband held out my cognac vegan leather jacket—fake crap peeling at the elbows. I’d trade every one of Cody’s syrupy compliments for an Armani lambskin coat.

We headed out the door, squinting into the low evening sun. Although I pasted on a smile, wickedness lurked beneath it. Fine clothes couldn’t disguise my darkness; money couldn’t repair what I had done. The evil had already emerged, and there was no stuffing it back inside.

Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Marin

The short but scenic drive from Wilkinsburg to Oakmont followed the Allegheny River past trees set ablaze by the sinking sun. Although Wilkinsburg was a decaying town, it was home to me and one of the most architecturally unique train stations on the East Coast—a 1916 masterpiece boasting a massive skylight that floodlit the terrazzo and mosaic floors, and whose clock tower reminded me of the one in Back to the Future. Like most Gen Y’ers, I tended to see real-life things through the prism of pop culture.

Foliage in the hills of Pennsylvania was breathtaking, every turn on the winding roads a brand-new shock of color and beauty. A marbling of pink and burnt orange set the sky afire, in blinding contrast to the gray river with its whitecaps churning against the wind.