Nine months pregnant with our son, I let my husband Daniel talk me into one last quiet trip to a cabin on Mount Rainier, completely unaware he’d already taken out a fifty-million-dollar life insurance policy on both me and the baby and carefully chosen the exact icy, isolated viewpoint with no phone signal and no witnesses.

When he was sure no one was watching he turned on me, blaming me for prying into his business debts, and without a single second of hesitation shoved me backward off the thousand-foot cliff; I landed broken and bleeding on a narrow rocky ledge halfway down, and through the roaring wind I heard his mistress Olivia call down impatiently asking if I was finally dead, and Daniel laugh back that for fifty million dollars I’d better be.

I fought to stay awake for two hours, every breath agony, using my last bit of strength to shield my belly, when a black helicopter appeared through the blizzard and a rescuer rappelled down beside me; he pulled off his goggles and froze, and I recognized him instantly from the old photo my mother had hidden in her cookbook for sixteen years—the father I’d never known, who’d spent decades searching for me, and who was about to burn Daniel’s perfect crime to the ground.