Prologue

PROLOGUE

ANNA

A ll the lights in the apartment are off. I wander into the kitchen, my head full of a sleepy fuzziness that only caffeine can cure. I pour my first coffee of the day and it's only when I'm breathing in the steam that I realize how quiet it is.

Mariana usually gets up far earlier than I do, and she never works in silence so the fact that I can hear absolutely nothing coming from the office is puzzling.

I say office, it's basically a glorified cupboard in the apartment. We have a plan to find a real space to work in once we start selling. We're developing an app which we hope is going to revolutionize the way people work with their clients, and as soon as we get it out there, we're going to go professional. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but I keep imagining the champagne I'm going to drink at our launch party.

Maybe Mariana went out. It's not impossible. She usually tells me her plans three weeks in advance, but maybe a flash of spontaneity hit her for a change.

She's my business partner and friend, a blond bombshell daughter of an oil tycoon. Her attention to detail is out of this world, as sharp as her eyeliner and as glossy as her nail polish. I always feel so plain next to her, but she never leaves me out of her schemes or makes me feel boring for being the loser of my family.

It doesn't really matter to me where she actually is anyway because I have a full workday planned. We've been running test versions of our software and today I'm going to reach out to some friends of my brother to see if they want to beta test the very first demo.

Finally, it's all coming together. I'm going to drink so much champagne when this takes off.

Coffee now gently buzzing in my brain, I meander into the office. The desk is littered in loose papers, the open window making them flap gently against the wood. Which is weird too. We're not ground floor so it's not that big of a deal, but Mariana has always been paranoid about this sort of thing. She has the temperament of a flighty bird and I've always found it far easier to go along with her quirks than argue with her.

I cross the room to pull the window shut. It slams unceremoniously, trapping an icy gust inside. I shiver.

There's no time to worry about Mariana now. She's a grown-up and I have meetings. I have a list of people I want to talk to today and I'm not going to rest until I have at least three beta testers confirmed.

I swing into the chair and start tidying the papers away. At first, I don't look too closely at them, but the red lettering on one sheet catches my eye. This is the final warning , it reads.

A cold chill sweeps down my spine and sets my teeth on edge. What the hell?

As I read the letters, it goes from bad to worse. Bank accounts in overdraft. Credit limits hit. Rent overdue.

Rent? Mariana told me she owned this place. According to her, her father bought it for her as a birthday present, which is why I've never had to pay so much as a single cent. Instead, I invested everything I ever saved into our joint business account on the understanding that Mariana would deal with the backstage details and I would be customer facing, design creating, idea generating.

This paperwork is telling me a different horror story, though. Our account is at its limit and they're going to shut it down. Our apartment is so far behind on rent that they're threatening to evict us. Wait — they are going to evict us.

I double over and retch into the waste bin. My whole body is shaking, cold nausea spreading into my every pore and paralyzing me into staring at the scrawled apology that Mariana's left me. A single sorry! written as an afterthought on a sticky note on top of her plane ticket confirmation. A printout explanation of what she's done.

I'm too numb to cry. I'm too numb to move.

And from the looks of it, Mariana's hightailed it to the Maldives to live off the money she's stolen from me.

I've got nothing left. And I've got three days to find somewhere else to go.