My heart hammered a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I knew that car. I knew the man inside. And I knew that in exactly sixty seconds, my family’s entire world—the façade of perfection they had built on a foundation of lies—was going to go up in flames.

My name is Maya Vance. For most of my life, I’ve been the shadow daughter. The one who stayed in the background, a silent observer, while my older sister, Chloe, soaked up every ounce of my parents’ praise like a parched desert drinking in the rain.

I’m a researcher. I spend my days in soil labs that smell of earth and ozone, and deep-tech greenhouses humid with the breath of a thousand plants. I try to figure out how to feed a planet that’s running out of resources. It’s quiet work. It’s humble work. And to my parents, Robert and Diane, it was a source of deep, burning embarrassment.

“Why can’t you be more like Chloe?” my mother would sigh, adjusting a flower arrangement that was already perfect. “She married well. She has… ambition.”

Chloe was the golden child. She married a man named Julian, a high-level VP at Agro Global, one of the largest food conglomerates in the world. Julian drove a car that cost more than my college tuition and wore watches that could feed a village for a year. My parents treated him like royalty, fawning over his titles and his tailored suits.

Then there was my husband, Caleb.