PROLOGUE
1017 Words
*****
The thing about standing at the edge of a cliff is that it simplifies everything.
All the noise that fills your head on an ordinary day - the doubt, the endless second-guessing, the loop of what ifs that plays on repeat at three in the morning when the house is quiet and the darkness presses in - all of it just stops. You stand there with the wind pulling at your hair and the sound of water crashing against rocks somewhere far below, and your mind goes completely, mercifully still. Like a snow globe after the shaking stops.
I wasn't afraid. That surprised me more than anything else - how thoroughly the fear had drained away, replaced by something that felt almost like peace. I'd spent so long being afraid in that house. I'd spent so long reading his moods the way sailors read weather, watching for the particular set of his jaw or the silence that went a half-second too long, making myself quiet and careful and easy to love. Fear had been my constant companion for so many months that I'd stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a sound that never switches off. It had simply become the background noise of my life.
And now, standing at the edge of what everyone who mattered would assume was my ending, I felt nothing but the salt air on my face and the cold certainty settling in my chest like a stone finding the bottom of a lake.
This is going to work.
He needed to believe I was gone. Not left - he would look for a woman who had left. He would hire people, make calls, use the particular machinery of his wealth and his charm and his righteous, injured fury to find a woman who had simply walked away. No, he needed to believe I was gone in the final, unambiguous way. He needed to believe the cliff had done what cliffs are designed to do.
One of us had to disappear from this story. I had decided - quietly, carefully, over the course of many weeks, in the small hours of mornings when he slept beside me and I lay completely still and planned - that it was going to be me. On my own terms, in my own way, alive.
The water was black and churning sixty feet below. The rocks were real. The drop was real. But I had thought it through - every step, every contingency, every piece of this that had to look right - with the obsessive precision of someone who understands that the difference between a plan that works and a plan that doesn't is the details you forgot to account for.
I hadn't forgotten anything.
I looked back at the house one last time. The lights were burning in the master bedroom window, and I could see his silhouette moving behind the glass - the shape of him, familiar and beloved and terrifying, the man I had loved so much it had taken me an embarrassingly long time to understand that love and safety are not the same thing. That you can love someone with everything you have and still need to run from them.
Something in my chest pulled. That's the cruelest thing about loving a dangerous person - the love doesn't get the memo when everything else does. It lingers. It leaves a residue, warm and aching, right up until the moment you have to use it against them.
I turned away from the light in the window.
I took a breath.
I jumped.
*****
And I survived.
But that's not where this story begins. This story begins fourteen months earlier, at a gallery opening in Boston, when a man looked at me across a crowded room and smiled, and I felt something shift in my chest like a key turning in a lock I hadn't known was there. It begins with a wedding dress and borrowed pearls and a house on the coast of Maine that had already swallowed one woman whole and was quietly, patiently making room for another.
It begins with me walking into a life that already belonged to someone else.
My name is Claire Ashworth. I was the second Mrs. Harlow.
And I am going to tell you exactly what happened - every detail, every moment, every choice I made and every choice that was made for me.
I'm going to tell you the truth.
Just - not necessarily in the order you'd expect.
*****
Chapters
PROLOGUE3
CHAPTER ONE: THE WEDDING9
CHAPTER TWO: THE HOUSE15
CHAPTER THREE: DOROTHY22
CHAPTER FOUR: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY ONE30
CHAPTER FIVE: THE DETECTIVE34
CHAPTER SIX: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY TWO41
CHAPTER SEVEN: WHAT THOMAS SAW46
CHAPTER EIGHT: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY THREE53
CHAPTER NINE: WHAT AGNES KNEW58
CHAPTER TEN: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY FOUR65
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE EAST WALL71
CHAPTER TWELVE: THE DINNER PARTY82
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THREE IN THE MORNING87
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY FIVE98
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE WRONG QUESTION103
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: DOROTHY SPEAKS110
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE LAST NORMAL MORNING117
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: AGNES LEAVES EARLY125
CHAPTER NINETEEN: WHAT THE STORAGE UNIT HELD131
CHAPTER TWENTY: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - THE FINAL ENTRY138
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: AFTER145
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THE WOMAN IN THE GARDEN152
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: MARA159
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: REBECCA165
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: THE TRIAL173
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: ELIZA'S LETTER182
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE VERDICT188
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: THE CLIFF192
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: DOROTHY'S GARDEN201
CHAPTER THIRTY: SIX MONTHS LATER205
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: WILDER'S LAST CALL207
EPILOGUE211
THE LAST MRS. HARLOW
Isaac Agumba AS Cathryne McOwuor
COPYRIGHT
© 2026 Isaac Agumba
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher, except
in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First Edition
© 2026 Isaac Agumba
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*****
- Writer
