Prologue
She will forever be twenty-nine. Dead. The girl was dead. The fetus that was being housed inside her beautiful body. Dead. A woman who will never see thirty. A woman who will never hear her baby cry for the first time.
All that ripped from her in a moment. It might have been a bit longer than a moment, actually—she’d been missing for two weeks.
A missing twenty-nine-year-old pregnant lady gave the entire town something to talk about. Local gossip conferred she’d run off.
She never wanted to be a mother. Jessica understands that all too well.
The girl probably escaped to get a back alley aborti•n, one town lady said to the evening news.
That hadn’t been why she was missing. Someone took her, but they brought her back. Back to the wrong house! Left her. Dead. On Jessica’s porch.
Why on her porch?
The girl’s decomposing skin is a splotchy blue-green hue. Been dead a bit, it seems. Jessica’s no coroner, though.
Jessica wished she had been easier when she was younger. She wasn’t. She was the kind of girl teachers would describe as a handful, trouble. A troubled child. She didn’t even finish the ninth grade.
Now an adult, she’s kept to herself since she came to this town when she was merely days shy of turning fifteen.
All these years of hiding haven’t been for nothing! There are cops, caution tape, and reporters on her front lawn. Of course, she called nine-one-one when she opened her door to a dead body, but now she regrets it. She can’t be on the television. She can’t be interviewed. She’ll refuse.
Jessica has never been considered pretty. Plain faced with an average build. The only thing odd about her is her feet. Abnormally large for the rest of her body. She’s been pretty lucky; most people don’t stare at feet too often. It’s been hard to find shoes to fit her entire life. She mostly shops in the men’s section. Solid black ones. Easy enough.
Jessica’s been able to hide in plain sight, but this dead body showing up is about to ruin everything!
The lead officer flashes his tar-stained teeth at her before requesting, “Jessica, we’re gonna need a statement. Do you mind coming down to the office?”
Jessica isn’t her actual name. In 1995, when she arrived in this town, she went to the library and researched the top girl names from the eighties. Jessica was the number one baby name given to females born in 1980—according to the Social Security Administration—with almost half a million girls named Jessica, she was sure to blend in. And she did, until now.
𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐓𝐰𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐲-𝐍𝐢𝐧𝐞 is an all new stand-alone psychological thriller from the Best Selling Author in Women’s Psychological Fiction, T.M. Shivener.
Pre-order the ebook now -> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DR9MVDH1
*this is unedited and may change slightly before publication.
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