Her mouth parted in response, but I powered on. "I know the risk I'm taking. But I just need to know if there's any truth to—" I gripped the table in support, the blunt angles digging into my palms. "My dad left me nothing. It hurt like hell then, but I brushed it off because I was a child. Now, I want to know why. It's not about the money. I just need to know if something changed."

"Just wanted to make sure." Resigned, she snatched the remote from the ottoman and threw herself on the couch, her mid-back length hair hanging over the armrest. "You can do this."

"I can. It’ll be simple," I repeated while I examined my appearance one final time. I looked nothing like the little girl Margaret had last seen at my father’s funeral, and not all that much like the young woman her lawyer turned away seven years ago, but I was still terrified she would know. That she'd immediately spot the word IMPOSTOR branded all over me—from the straight blond hair that I'd worked into a sleek ponytail, to my heart-shaped face with its small nose and full cheeks, and finally my eyes. Brown with amber flecks—eyes that looked ... terrified.

For a damn good reason.

If this ended badly, if I was found out, so much ugly would be unleashed I couldn't even stand to think about it without strings weaving tightly through my ribcage and suffocating me.

I could go to prison for this.

Smoothing back a nonexistent stray wisp of platinum hair, I spun away from the mirror. I faced Pen with my hands fisted by my side. She glanced up from the DVR’d episode of Sleepy Hollow and smiled encouragingly. "You have this. Get in there—"

"And take that bitch down," I finished breathlessly, and she pumped her fist.

"That's my girl. I'll stick around for the day, just in case you need me. As long as you don't mind, that is?"

Picking up my purse and keys, I shook my head. "Make yourself at home."

“Did you think I wouldn’t?” She returned her attention to the TV, but before I left the apartment, she cleared her throat tentatively. Lowering my hand from the doorknob, I looked back at her.

"You're not Gemma there. Don't forget that,” she gently reminded. “You're Lizzie."

It was something I couldn't forget. I’d crammed that reminder into my brain ever since she and I came up with this crazy, messy plan. My name was Lizzie Connelly, not Gemma Emerson. Gemma Emerson didn’t exist—at least, not where Lizzie was concerned.

Clearing the lump of hysteria from the back of my throat, I bobbed my head briskly, and Pen’s shoulders relaxed. "I remembered to be Lizzie a couple weeks ago when I met with HR, so you don’t need to worry. Besides, this’ll be simple."

As I drove from the seaside Marina del Rey apartment in my leased Mini Cooper, I continued to tell myself that.

*

Up until a week and a half ago, I hadn't stepped foot in Los Angeles since I was sixteen—when I hopped a Greyhound bus from Vegas with the intent of meeting with my stepmother. My parents had divorced when I was seven, and the moment everything was finalized my tall, dark-eyed mother had promptly departed the city with me in tow.  She was a model, which was how she met my father, and at first, we moved wherever her work took her—New York, Miami, Chicago, but never back to Los Angeles. By the time I was thirteen, I'd lived in more places than most people visited in their lifetime, but I welcomed it.

Mom and I had been a team, and it hadn't mattered where we lived.

Sin City was our final move. It had come a couple months before my fifteenth birthday, but we would have ended up in a new city if my mom hadn’t died a year later. It was one of those wrong place at the wrong time tragedies I always read about but didn’t think would happen to us—she’d forgotten her credit cards at home and when she went into the convenience store to pay for gas, she walked into a robbery that had already turned deadly.

She was killed. And so was that team of ours that was my world.

With my mother's entire family in Ukraine, and relatively unknown to me, I’d stuck around the apartment we'd shared in North Vegas and prayed the state wouldn't catch wind of me living alone. The idea of being tossed into the foster care system for two years scared the shit out of me, but I successfully avoided it. Since my mother’s death, the only time I had left Sin City, I'd returned almost immediately—nearly too broke to put food in my refrigerator and still reeling from my meeting with Margaret's attorney.

But here I was. In Los Angeles, of all places.

And even though I’d lived in Vegas far longer than anywhere else, as the early October heat beat down on the open sunroof, I realized that L.A. still felt like home.

Which wasn't a good thing.

There was too much attachment associated with that word. Home.

"Stupid, stupid girl," I scolded myself over the Black Stone Cherry song pulsing quietly through my tiny car.

Curling my fingers firmly around the black steering wheel, I turned the candy apple red Mini Cooper into the ground floor of the five-story parking garage attached to Emerson & Taylor, stopping for the attendant on duty. After gaining entrance with the temporary pass I received from human resources last week, I drove to the first free space I could find—a spot on the bottom floor, squeezed between a dented Nissan Juke and a glossy yellow Corvette. As I exited the car, my body trembled like a leaf inside the high-waist beige pencil skirt and tucked-in white blouse I'd confidently donned earlier this morning.

God, I was in over my head.

It was one thing to let Pen hack Emerson & Taylor's security system and get me far enough into the hiring process that they absolutely had to call me in for the job, but it was an entirely different matter to present false identification to the human resources department that would corroborate my new identity.

And yet, I was seconds away from prancing my ass into that building to do just that. No wonder Pen had driven here from Vegas. She probably wanted to make sure I wouldn't have a nervous breakdown that would implicate us both.

I pressed the lock button on the circular key fob with so much force I was surprised it didn't jam. "When this is all over, I'm so getting her that new laptop she won't shut up about." Squaring my shoulders, I dropped my keys into my secondhand black Prada bag and followed the white arrows on the concrete floor.

This is going to be simple, I promised myself as I stepped inside the elevator and punched the starred button. I just have to be smart.

"Hey, do you mind?" a slightly accented, feminine voice yelled out, and I reached my hand out to keep the elevator doors from shutting. Several seconds later, a woman no taller than my five-foot-four rushed inside, her caramel skin flushed. She was balancing two drink carriers and a neon pink box emanating a delicious aroma that did a number on my empty stomach.

Tilting her head back, she shook her bouncy, jet-black curls out and rested in the corner of the elevator to catch her breath. "You're a lifesaver," she thanked me as the doors silently closed and we started to move up to the lobby. "I didn't remember it was my turn to bring coffee until twenty minutes ago when I was already at my desk."

“So you rushed out to get them?”

“Like an idiot,” she laughed, tapping one of her feet, which were clad in strappy, red patent leather wedged sandals. “Nearly twisted my ankle running around in these things.”

I frowned. "Need some help?"

Lowering her head, she stared me down with dark, almost black, eyes. She blinked a couple times before moving her head to either side and releasing a throaty laugh that oozed sensuality. "You must be new." I lifted both eyebrows, and she added, "Helpfulness is dead around here."