The Other Daughter

She died in the most beautiful house on the street.

Nobody called for help. Nobody came downstairs. Her mother was in the next room laughing with friends over wine, and Elise Harrington lay on the herringbone floor of her east-facing bedroom and understood, in the last coherent moment available to her, that she had always been the wrong daughter in the wrong house.

She had known since she was eighteen. She had the documents, the birth record, the name of the family she actually belonged to. She had been building her case with the quiet, devastating patience of someone who had learned very early that patience was the only weapon available to her.

She was eleven days too slow.

When she opens her eyes she is fifteen years old, sitting at a desk in the south-facing bedroom she lost to Sophia six years ago, with a school timetable in her hand and everything she knows stored in her head like a perfectly indexed file.

She has seven years.

She intends to use every single one of them.

The Other Daughter is a story about a woman who gets to go back, build it right, and make sure that this time, when the truth finally lands, everyone is exactly where she needs them to be.