Prologue

Juliet Morgan had made the same wish every birthday since she was six years old and had been old enough to know something wasn't entirely right with her family. For eight years, she had closed her eyes and blew out her candles and whispered the same phrase silently in her head.

I wish I knew my mother.

Until she was six, Juliet hadn't really known she was lacking a mother. Sure, her best friend Amalia Zacchara had one, but it didn't occur to Juliet that hers had gone away. She just…wasn't there but her dad was and so were her aunt and a few uncles. She had two older brothers, a bunch of cousins. She never thought about moms.

Then Amalia told her that she'd heard her parents discussing—more like arguing because Amalia's parents had spent every day of their divorced lives arguing with one another and to be honest, a great deal of their marriage—Juliet's mother and what had happened to her.

It would be the only version that Juliet would ever hear. Her brothers, Cameron and Jake, hadn't been old enough to remember what had happened and Jason Morgan, her father, never spoke of it. Juliet personally thought he might have forbidden anyone to speak of it in his presence. And hers.

In the eight years since Juliet learned that she'd had a mother once, Amalia had bugged her parents for more details and they had a much clearer picture. When Juliet had been six months old, Elizabeth Morgan had left for work one morning and simply vanished. No trace of her, living or dead, had ever been found.

The general consensus, Amalia had reported when they were twelve, was that Elizabeth had become tired of the dangerous lifestyle and taken off. Amalia's mom didn't believe that. Elizabeth, according to Nadine Zacchara, had loved her kids more than life and her husband had been the center of everything to her.

Juliet had quizzed her oldest brother mercilessly as he had the only truly clear memories out of the three of them but Cameron had been only five, so she'd long ago sucked him dry of anything worthwhile.

Desperate though she was for information, Juliet was careful to keep her obsession from her father. Jason never spoke about his wife, but when they were thirteen, Amalia overheard Nadine talking about that awful year Jason had disappeared to search for Elizabeth, leaving his kids with best friend Carly Jacks.

He'd returned empty-handed, of course, but had never filed for divorce or tried to have his wife declared legally dead. Poor man just waited for her to come back, Nadine clucked sympathetically to a fellow nurse while Amalia had been pretending to do her homework a few feet away.

Amalia and Juliet had found the idea Jason's eternal devotion very romantic and Amalia secretly wished her own parents had the same sort of story. Unfortunately, the background behind the unlikely pairing of tortured bad boy Johnny Zacchara and pretty nurse Nadine Crowell was both well-known and the opposite of romantic.

Amalia's wickedly fascinating aunt Claudia had clued the duo in when they were eleven and she'd felt they were old enough to know the reality of life. Johnny and Nadine were never actually together but after a few drinks too many one night, they'd slept together and Nadine turned up pregnant. Johnny did the right thing and married her. Of course, everyone knew that the marriage had cracked up four years later and Johnny had been through two other wives since then but Nadine had remained single.

Amalia was the only product of the marriage and from the time she was eleven, had known that she was a mistake. She was horribly jealous of her best friend for having parents that had loved each other but then she'd found out that Juliet's mother had gotten knocked up by Jason Morgan while she was married to someone else and lied to him about Juliet's brother Jake. It had helped take a little of the bitterness away.

Parents were very weird.

So now the girls were fourteen. Juliet had made her usual wish and wondered if this year would be the year she'd know what had happened to her mother.

And Amalia wondered if maybe this year she'd know why her parents hated each other so much that they couldn't be in the same room together without bitterness and anger.