Chapter 1

My daughter Charlotte was five years old.

She was born with a congenital heart and lung condition, and she had a deadly allergy to strawberries.

One bite of anything made with strawberries would trigger full-body anaphylactic shock. She would suffocate and die.

On her fifth birthday, I stood gripping a critical condition notice, my fingernails digging into the paper until the edges crumbled.

A doctor pulled me into the ICU hallway, his voice cold as a winter frost.

"Mrs. Jones, Charlotte has gone into anaphylactic shock. Her heart and lung failure has worsened. She won't survive the day. The allergen was strawberry. Someone deliberately gave her food containing strawberries."

My mind went blank. A roar of white noise filled my head.

For Charlotte's sake, there had never been a single strawberry in our home. Not one berry, not one spoonful of jam, not one slice of strawberry cake.

I checked every meal she ate every single day. There was no room for error.

No matter how hard I thought, I couldn't figure out how she had come into contact with that deadly fruit.

The only way to save her was to find her father, Alexander.

If he would just sign the consent form to donate his hematopoietic stem cells, Charlotte could live.

I had loved Alexander for eight years. I had been married to him for five. I had stood by his side through bankruptcy and built everything with him until he became CEO of the Alexander Group.

But the moment his first love, Sophie, came back into his life, he threw Charlotte and me away without looking back.