Epigraph

EPIGRAPH

Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.

—HELEN GURLEY BROWN

Prologue

PROLOGUE

The walk-in closet would be any girl’s dream. A thick pink rug lay on the hardwood floor, perfect for bare toes first thing in the morning. Shelves and cubbies lined the walls, filled with designer purses and jewelry and dozens of shoes. Luxurious clothes in every color of the rainbow hung in careful rows: blouses and skirts in silk, cashmere, cotton.

For most girls, this closet would be heaven. For me, it was just another reminder that heaven was exactly where I wasn’t.

Next to me in the narrow space, my twin sister, Emma Paxton, ran her fingers through the rich fabrics of my clothes, her heart clenched in a knot of grief. She has my exact chestnut hair and long legs, the same marine-blue eyes lined by dark lashes. She is my identical twin, after all. But even though I stood right next to her, hers was the only reflection in the three-way mirror at the end of the closet.

Ever since I died, I’d been invisible. But somehow I still lingered among the living, attached through forces I don’t understand to the long-lost sister I never had a chance to meet. The sister who’d been forced by my killer to take over my life. Since my death, Emma had fooled all my friends and family into thinking she was me, Sutton Mercer. She’d been fighting tooth and nail to find out what happened the night I died, and she’d managed to eliminate my family and my best friends as suspects. But the leads were quickly dwindling, the clues drying up. And the killer was still watching, somewhere in the shadows, making sure she didn’t step out of line.

Now Emma stood in socks and underwear, a dazed expression on her face as she stared up at my wardrobe. It seemed ridiculous that after everything that had happened—the losses she’d suffered, the terror she’d lived in—the simple act of getting dressed could feel so overwhelming. But maybe it was because of her losses, because of her terror, that the simplest choices had turned complicated in her agitated mind. Emma had never had this kind of closet in her old life. Placed in the foster system of Las Vegas after our mother, Becky, abandoned her, Emma moved from home to home with her secondhand T-shirts packed in a duffel bag. I had so many clothes, so many dresses: short and tight or long and flowing, in bright wild prints or plain blocked color, with sequins or ruching or lace trim. There were, of course, more than a half dozen in black to choose from.

Suddenly, Emma began to tremble. She sank to the plush rug, hugging her arms around her knees as tears rolled down her cheeks.