He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

Chapter 1 — The Room Where They Thought I Was Sleeping

“If Genevieve walks into that wedding clear-eyed and well, Sabrina will never be able to take her place.”

I heard that sentence a week before I was supposed to marry Christian Prescott — one of the most famous pop artists in the country — while I lay still in a private suite at a wellness clinic outside Columbus, letting the whole world believe I was asleep.

I had been checked in three days earlier for what Christian’s team called “exhaustion” and “pre-wedding stress,” a plausible enough story that I had almost believed it myself; I had, after all, been strangely tired for weeks, worn thin in a way I could not name.

It was only later, listening in that dim room, that I understood the exhaustion had been arranged as carefully as everything else.

I kept my breathing slow and even.

And I listened to the man I was about to marry explain, in a voice of terrible calm, exactly what I was and had always been to him — which was not, it turned out, the love of his life.