She had found him dead on the kitchen floor after arriving home from work one evening. He had been about to make dinner. There were chopped vegetables on a wooden block next to a knife, a saucepan filled with water waiting to be placed on the stove, an open packet of dried pasta.

She’d pumped his chest with shaking hands, thirty compressions, before delivering two rescue breaths. His lips were already blue and felt ice cold when pressed against her own, but still she repeated the procedure over and over again with no response.

Then she was hitting him and holding him and begging him not to leave her.

Tony Shaw had suffered sudden cardiac death caused by hypertrophic cardiomyopathy—a genetic heart condition that had, to the best of Jessica’s knowledge, been undiagnosed. A ticking time bomb inside his chest waiting to explode. She had been advised to undergo screening for signs of a similar heart condition, as well as genetic tests to determine whether she had inherited the same faulty gene. They’d hooked her up to machines and computers and eventually told her she had nothing to worry about. Her heart was strong and healthy and absolutely fine.

They were wrong. Jessica’s heart wasn’t fine. It had been smashed into a million pieces. She would never be fine again.

She had cried hard the day Tony died as she’d cradled him in her arms on the cold tiled floor. She hadn’t shed a single tear since. Not at the funeral. Not when she’d handed in her notice and told her boss she was leaving the job she loved. Not even when she’d handed over the keys to the Realtor and walked out of the home she’d shared with Tony for the last time without so much as a backward glance.

There were ghosts lurking in every corner of every room of that house in Blissville. They were on every street Jessica walked down, every corner she turned. Whether she was picking up lunch at the deli on the corner of Greenpoint and Starr, having a beer at the Jar Bar, or taking in an old movie at the Film Noir Cinema, she couldn’t escape the memory of Tony. He was everywhere. She had known she would have to get as far away from New York as she possibly could.

Now, it seemed to Jessica she had been running from a life she knew nothing about. A past that belonged to someone else. She wasn’t Jessica Shaw, New York PI, daughter of shy and talented local photographer Tony Shaw. She was Alicia Lavelle, notorious missing daughter of a murdered woman, a child whose face had been as synonymous with the early ’90s in Eagle Rock as Calvin Klein perfume and Nirvana CDs.