Dead Before The Plane Crashed

Jasper Lawrence and I were famous for our mutual destruction. We had turned our marriage into an active war zone. When he dropped half a million dollars at a charity gala to outbid everyone for a supermodel’s company, I turned around the next morning and quietly leaked an eight-figure municipal contract to his fiercest corporate rival. When he brazenly brought an A-list starlet back to our penthouse for the night, I hired eighteen male models the very next evening, turning the estate into a neon-drenched, bass-thumping nightclub. When he looked the other way while his pet secretary poisoned my rescue cat, I didn't cry—I hired an excavator and dug up the secretary's family burial plot. We spent two whole years locked in this scorched-earth tango. Then the society pages exploded: Jasper Lawrence had been photographed escorting an anonymous college girl into the premier maternity ward in the city. The entire high-society circle held its breath, placing bets on how catastrophically I would lose my mind this time. Yet for three days, I didn't move a single muscle. Even Jasper finally came home, unsettled by the silence. He loosened his silk tie, eyeing me with an arched, suspicious brow. "Why so tame this time?" I flicked my lighter and calmly drew in a drag from my cigarette, watching the smoke curl into the air. "I got bored." He smirked, leaning against the doorframe, that familiar arrogance dripping from his tone. "Bored of the games? Does that mean you and I can finally—" "Compared to all those flimsy human shields you keep parading around," I cut him off, offering a slow, venomous smile, "I decided it’d be far more entertaining to just kidnap the songbird you've actually been hiding." The smug nonchalance vanished from his face. For the first time in our blood-soaked marriage, Jasper Lawrence looked genuinely, utterly terrified. He didn't say a word. He whipped around, tore down the marble stairs, and peeled out of the driveway in his car. I followed him through the evening traffic, keeping an exact three-car distance. Yet when I finally saw the turn he took—when his sleek black sedan pulled up against the cracked curb under a familiar row of overgrown oak trees—my stomach dropped into a freezing, bottomless void. It was the suburban house where I grew up. … "Lacey, open the door!" Jasper pounded on the heavy wood like a madman, his fists shaking the glass panels. Moments later, the latch clicked open. Lacey stood in the doorway, her soft eyes widening in shock. "Jasper? What on earth... why are you here?" Before she could finish, Jasper grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her violently into his chest. His voice cracked with a terror I had never heard him possess. "You're okay. Thank God. Thank God you're okay." Lacey froze against him, utterly bewildered. "What happened? Why are you in such a panic?" Drawn by the commotion, my parents appeared in the foyer. My mother was the first to speak, her voice trembling with concern. "Jasper, sweetheart, what's going on?" Jasper slowly released Lacey, but his hands stayed hovering at her elbows, his gaze locked onto her face like a lifeline. "Simone lost her mind. She told me she hired people to snatch the person I've been hiding. I was terrified she’d come here. I drove as fast as I could." Mid-sentence, Jasper went completely rigid. The realization hit him like cold water. He had been played. The humid evening air in the front yard died instantly. My parents looked past him, their gazes locking onto the driveway. Their faces turned to stone. Jasper followed their line of sight. He turned around and saw me standing there, half-drowned in the amber wash of the streetlamp. I stood perfectly still. I had watched every frantic breath, every frantic touch, every ounce of unguarded desperation. I had swallowed every single second of it. A chill seeped deep into my bones, freezing my blood to slush. The moment Jasper’s eyes met mine, his expression hardened into an impenetrable wall of ice. Almost by instinct, he stepped backward, shielding Lacey behind his broad frame, watching me like I was a rabid dog. "Nothing to say to me?" I asked. My voice was eerily quiet, flat, devoid of the fire he usually loved to fan. Jasper’s jaw clenched, his knuckles whitening as he kept Lacey shielded. "Since you followed me and figured it out, I won't insult our intelligence by lying to you." He reached behind him and took Lacey’s small, pale hand into his own. The tenderness in his eyes when he glanced back at her was a language he had never spoken to me in all our years together. "Lacey and I are together," he said. My gaze shifted from his face to my mother’s, and then to my father’s. Neither of them blinked. Neither of them looked remotely surprised. They had known all along. A sudden, blunt weight slammed into my ribs, fracturing the breath inside my lungs with a dull, sickening ache. I blinked against the stinging behind my eyes, looking directly at my mother. "Why did you keep this from me?" My mother let out a sharp, mocking scoff. "You've been a selfish leech since the day you were conceived. You sucked all the nutrients dry in my womb and strangled your twin brother to death before he could take his first breath. You were born broken, Simone. Trouble, spite, cruelty—it's all you've ever known. Who knows what venom you’d spit at Lacey if you found out?" A violent shudder went through me. I instinctively looked toward the girl hiding behind Jasper’s shoulder. My throat constricted, tight and aching. "Lacey... is that what you think of me, too?" She kept her chin tucked against her chest, refusing to meet my eyes. Her silence was a signed confession. The grief and betrayal I had bottled up for years finally ruptured, ripping through my vocal cords in a broken, ragged cry. "If you loved him, you could have just told me! You knew damn well I would never have touched him if you wanted him!" When we were children, after my parents became convinced I had murdered my twin brother in utero, they had tried to give me up to an orphanage. It was Lacey who had thrown her frail body across the front door, sobbing until she choked, begging them not to throw me out. When my parents gave me the cold shoulder, freezing me out of family dinners, it was Lacey who slipped into my room, giving me her prettiest dresses, saving her allowance to buy me pastries. I had etched every shred of her warmth into my memory. Over the years, whenever there was a burden she didn't want to carry, I stepped up and bore it in her place. Whenever trouble brewed, I took the fall. I couldn't fathom how the sister who had supposedly loved me—the only person in this world I had poured my soul into protecting—could hold the dagger that gutted me. I stared at her downcast head, my voice scraping raw against my teeth. "Why, Lacey? Why him?" Lacey’s shoulders trembled. After an agonizing pause, she squeezed out three pathetic, whisper-thin syllables. "I'm sorry." The second the words left her mouth, Jasper reached up, his thumb tenderly wiping away the solitary tear tracing her cheek. "This has nothing to do with Lacey," he snapped, his glare darting back to me, razor-sharp. "Stop bullying her." Watching his careful, reverent touch, something inside me snapped like dry wood. Every breath tasted like rust. I had waged a bitter, exhausting, two-year war against Jasper Lawrence, ripping through his life to uncover the identity of the woman he kept hidden away like a treasure. Not once had it crossed my mind that the phantom was my own sister. I looked at the four of them standing on that porch. The deep-seated devotion and desperate longing I had harbored for this family suddenly seemed monstrously absurd. From the very beginning, I had never been a daughter, a sister, or a wife. I was an intruder. An inconvenience. An extra mouth that should have suffocated before birth. After all these years of bleeding for them, it was finally time to let the ghost rest. Lacey peeked out from behind Jasper, her mouth parting as if to offer another rehearsed apology, but before she could speak, she suddenly hunched over, pressing a hand to her mouth in a violent wave of dry heaves. In a fraction of a second, Jasper’s composure shattered. He lunged forward, his hands instantly steadying her back, his voice thick with frantic worry. "Where does it hurt? Is the baby making you sick again?" "The baby." The word struck me like an icepick driven straight through the center of my skull. My eyes drifted down, entirely beyond my control, landing on the subtle, undeniable curve of her lower abdomen beneath her loose linen top. She was pregnant. A wave of bitter, suffocating grief crested over my chest. A year ago, I had been pregnant, too. Back then, I had foolishly believed that a child might bridge the chasm between Jasper and me—that it might bring back the man who once looked at me like I was his entire world. But when I held out the positive ultrasound to him, he hadn't even looked up from his laptop. He had simply let out a disinterested grunt and turned the page of an acquisition report. Later, when I miscarried on a cold bathroom floor, he never once set foot in the hospital. Jasper would never know that the complications from that miscarriage had permanently scarred my reproductive system. I would never carry a child again. Perhaps my gaze lingered on Lacey’s stomach for a second too long. Jasper’s defensive instincts flared into open hostility. He stepped squarely in front of Lacey, completely blocking my view, the air around him turning deadly. "Simone, I am warning you," he said, his voice dropping into a guttural, dangerous register. "Don't you dare get any ideas about her or that baby. If anything happens to either of them—even a scratch—I will ruin you." He didn't need proof. To him, my wickedness was an established fact. Just then, Lacey pulled gently at his sleeve, her voice faint and fragile. "Jasper... I'm feeling a little faint. And hungry." With those few soft words, the entire porch shifted. My mother took her arm; my father held the door; Jasper hovered beside her, shielding her like a porcelain doll as they ushered her into the warmth of the house. I stood alone on the pavement, watching the door click shut behind them. They were a family. Complete. Whole. And I was an unwelcome shadow on their lawn. If there was no place for me under that roof, I would never cross its threshold again. I slipped inside through the side entrance, heading straight up the stairs to my childhood bedroom to retrieve the one thing I still cared about: the gold locket my grandmother had left me before she died. She had given one to Lacey and one to me. It was the only piece of genuine warmth I had left in the world. When I opened the bedroom door, my heart sank another inch. The room was no longer mine. It was packed to the ceiling with Lacey’s discarded clutter—empty designer shopping bags, old moving boxes, broken vanity mirrors. I had to dig through layers of dust and forgotten junk for nearly an hour before my fingers finally brushed against the cool metal of the locket hidden in the back of the bottom drawer. Clutching it tight in my palm, I walked back downstairs. The dining room table was already laden with steaming dishes. Jasper was just carrying the final platter out from the kitchen, setting it down with practiced domestic ease. Hearing my footsteps on the hardwood, Lacey looked up. "Simone... stay and eat dinner with us." I stopped at the edge of the dining room, my eyes sweeping over the spread. My breath caught. Every single dish—from the roasted chicken to the braised beef and the soup—was heavily, meticulously garnished with fresh cilantro. I had a severe, visceral aversion to cilantro. Even the faint smell of it made me gag. Growing up under this roof, I had no choice but to choke it down with tears in my eyes because my mother refused to accommodate my "dramatic fits." When Jasper and I first started dating, he had memorized every single one of my dietary quirks. Whenever we ate out, he would patiently pick every green leaf out of my bowl. When he cooked for me in our penthouse, cilantro was strictly banned from the kitchen. Yet at some point over the last two years, every meal prepared in our home had begun to feature it prominently. Whenever I brought it up, he would casually wave a hand and say, "Sorry, slipped my mind." It hadn't slipped his mind. He had simply reassigned his tenderness to someone else. The last ember of longing in my chest quietly turned to gray ash. "No thanks," I said, my voice dead and empty. I turned on my heel and walked out the front door into the dark, not looking back once. Things that didn't belong to me weren't worth looking at. ... Back at the penthouse, I choked down a few bites of cold takeout from the fridge. I had just set my suitcase on the bedroom rug and unzipped it when the front door swung open. Jasper walked in. Without a single word of preface, he slid a crisp, thick legal document onto the glass coffee table. His voice was hushed, almost gentle in its detachment. "Since everything is out in the open, let's just sign this." He leaned against the mantel. "I'm giving you fifty million dollars. It's more than enough to ensure you never have to work a day in your life. You can live in peace." I didn't glance at the papers. My eyes drifted instead to his left hand. His ring finger was completely bare. Only a faint, pale indentation remained where the band had rested for three years. I had custom-designed those rings myself. The engraving inside read "Through Fire and Time". There was a time when Jasper treated that ring like a sacred relic. The only time he had ever taken it off was two years ago, when an emergency MRI required all metal removed from his person. I had never imagined the day would come when he would slide it off willingly. Seeing that I hadn't moved, Jasper’s brows knitted together. "Why aren't you speaking? Do you have issues with the terms?" I slowly shook my head and looked up into his eyes. This was the man who had once knelt before a crowded ballroom, his eyes glistening with tears, swearing that I was the only home he had ever known. Now, his eyes were calm ponds of ice. My reflection didn't even ripple the surface. "You knew Lacey was the only person in this world I truly loved," I murmured, my voice scraping over gravel. "Why did it have to be her? Why did you have to use the only person who mattered to me to break me?" Jasper looked down at the expensive wool rug. "I'm sorry." A cheap, featherweight apology to cover a crater. "Anyone else in the world, Jasper," I pressed, staring directly through him. "Any socialite, any model, any stranger off the street. Why my sister?" He lifted his chin, his gaze unflinching, righteous in its certainty. "Because Lacey gave me a kidney." A heavy silence dropped between us. "If she hadn't stepped up three years ago," he said quietly, "I would have died on that operating table." My entire body locked into absolute paralysis. Beneath my silk blouse, my fingers instinctively twitched, grazing against the faded, jagged four-inch scar nestled against the lower right side of my back. My heart felt as if it had forgotten how to beat. Nobody knew. Three years ago, during that frantic, midnight organ match when his organs were failing—the person who signed the anonymous donor waiver, the person who lay on the operating table next to his and gave up a vital piece of her own flesh to keep him breathing— It was me. Before the truth could tear its way past my throat, Jasper continued, his voice hardening with conviction. "At first, I only wanted to repay the debt. I wanted to protect her and take care of her for the rest of her life. But being near her... I realized how pure she is. How bright and untainted. She isn't like you, Simone. She doesn't have your vicious, calculating streak." A bitter, corrosive acid flooded my chest. I wasn't born vicious. I had been soft once. Gentle. Eager to please. And that meekness had invited wolves. The first time I accompanied Jasper to an elite private dinner with his business partners, a group of predatory executives had cornered me, forcing drinks down my throat until I was curled on the bathroom floor, vomiting blood from acute gastritis. The next weekend, Jasper had rented out an entire private club, tracked down every single man who had held a glass to my lips, and handed me a bottle of high-proof whiskey. He had made me pour it down their throats until they choked on their own spit. "If you forgive your enemies, Simone," he had whispered into my ear that night, his hands steadying mine around the neck of the bottle, "you are committing suicide. Bite first. Make them bleed." He was the one who had methodically stripped away my softness. He was the one who had forged me into a blade to survive the cutthroat world he inhabited. And now that the blade was sharp, he looked at it with disgust, recoiling from the blood on the edge. How breathtakingly ironic. I looked at his cold, detached face, and every word of the truth died on my tongue. What would be the point? To beg for the scraps of his conscience? To demand love from a man whose soul had already rotted away from me? Jasper reached into his tailored breast pocket, pulled out an envelope, and tossed a one-way first-class plane ticket onto the coffee table beside the divorce settlement. "You always said you wanted to move to Europe. I bought you an estate in the countryside outside Zurich. Everything is set up. The staff, the accounts, the property deed. The flight leaves in three days. Just take it and go." I picked up the ticket, holding the glossy paper between trembling fingers. "So what you're saying is... once I leave, I should never come back. Right?" Jasper stayed silent. He didn't offer an excuse. He didn't offer a defense. His silence was an eviction notice from his life. I looked at him for five long seconds—taking in the sharp angles of the jaw I had once kissed in the dark, the shoulders I had wept against, the man I had loved with a feral, all-consuming devotion. Then, I picked up the heavy Montblanc pen from the tray, flipped to the final page, and signed my name. The ink didn't waver. ... The next morning, I continued packing. While clearing out the deepest corner of the walk-in closet, my hands hit a cedar storage chest. Inside lay a neat stack of tiny, hand-knitted baby clothes. Yellow booties. Pale blue cardigans with wooden buttons. Soft cotton swaddles. I had sewn every single stitch myself during those brief, glowing months when I thought I was going to be a mother. After the miscarriage, the sight of them had made me physically sick with grief. I hadn't had the courage to touch this box in two years. Now, looking at the tiny garments, they just seemed like relics from an alternate life that had never belonged to me. I ran my thumb over the plush yarn. When we were little girls, shivering in the cold of my parents' neglect, Lacey had held my hands under the blankets. I had whispered to her that when I grew up and made lots of money, I would buy her mountains of beautiful dresses. And if she ever had a baby, I’d fill an entire nursery with clothes I made myself. A quiet, tired sigh escaped my lips. I folded the little garments neatly, placing them into a gift box. I would leave them on the counter for her. A final fulfillment of a childhood promise. A clean break. Once the debt was settled, we owed each other nothing. I pulled out my phone, intending to text Jasper to let him know I was leaving early. "BAM!" The penthouse double doors were kicked open with a thunderous crash that splintered the mahogany frame. Jasper stormed into the foyer, his face twisted in savage, unhinged fury. Before I could even register what was happening, he lunged across the rug, grabbed me by the front of my shirt, and hurled me violently across the living room. I lost my balance completely. The back of my skull slammed hard against the sharp corner of the plaster wall. A sickening "crack" echoed through my ears. Blinding, white-hot agony flared across my scalp. Black spots swam across my vision. Before the vertigo could clear, a heavy shadow fell over me. Jasper dropped to his knees, his large hand clamping around my throat with crushing, suffocating force. His eyes were bloodshot, completely feral, his voice spitting venom into my face. "How dare you touch her, Simone? How dare you!" The pressure on my windpipe was brutal. "I gave you an exit! I gave you millions! I bought you a goddamn estate across the ocean! All you had to do was leave quietly—why couldn't you just stay in your lane?! Why did you have to hurt her?!" I clawed weakly at his iron fingers, the back of my head warm and wet with spreading blood. "I... I don't know... what you're..." "Stop lying!" he roared, shaking me so hard my head rattled against the floorboards. "Lacey was in a car crash ten minutes ago! The baby is dead!" A shudder ripped through my chest, cold and hollow. "It wasn't... me..." "Who else could it be?!" he snarled, his face inches from mine, his breath ragged and hot. "Every woman who ever dared look at me, you destroyed! You ran them out of town with your sick little schemes! And now you try to slaughter your own sister? That baby was your niece or nephew, you psychotic bitch! How could you be so evil?!" The air in my lungs was completely gone. Darkness encroached at the edges of my vision, my pulse roaring like a freight train in my ears. I opened my mouth, trying to choke out a defense, but he had already declared me guilty. To a man who wanted a monster, everything looked like claws. "You really don't think you did anything wrong, do you?" Jasper sneered, the fire in his eyes turning to absolute, arctic cruelty. He released my neck. I collapsed against the floor, gasping desperately for air, coughing so hard my ribs felt fractured. Before I could steady myself, two of his private security guards entered the room. "Take her down to the furnace basement," Jasper ordered, standing up and straightening his cuffs without glancing down at me. "Let her sit there and reflect on what she's done." "No... Jasper, wait..." The guards hoisted me up by my arms, dragging my dragging heels across the hardwood. The basement was the building's utility annex—a sealed, windowless concrete vault that housed the central water boilers for the penthouse. In the dead of summer, the temperature inside regularly hovered above a hundred and ten degrees. Thick, stifling, unmoving air. I had suffered from chronic, severe asthma since I was six years old. Extreme heat and oxygen-deprived environments triggered violent bronchial spasms within minutes. Jasper knew this better than anyone. He had sat by my bed with an inhaler a dozen times in the early days of our marriage. Yet he didn't even blink as the heavy steel door creaked open. "When you're ready to admit what you did to Lacey," Jasper said coldly from the threshold, "I'll think about letting you out." "Slam." The heavy deadbolt turned with an echoing clunk. The suffocating heat enveloped me instantly, thick as wet wool, pressing down on my chest like an anvil. Blood continued to trickle steadily from the back of my head, soaking the collar of my shirt, hot and sticky. Waves of nauseating pain pulsed through my skull. My chest seized. My lungs expanded, but took in only scalding, dead air. "Wheeze." A high, whistling gasp tore from my throat. I dragged my body toward the door, pounding against the steel with numb, trembling fists. "Help... please... someone..." Silence. Only the low, rhythmic hum of the industrial boilers answered. The room grew blurry. My strength evaporated. My knees gave out, and I crumpled onto the hot concrete floor, curled on my side, my fingers scraping weakly against the dust. As the shadows closed in and my consciousness began to unravel, an old memory drifted through the haze of agony. A candlelit terrace overlooking the Amalfi coast. Jasper, down on one knee, holding an open velvet box, his eyes brimming with a devotion so pure it had made me weep. "I swear to you, Simone. In this life and every life after, I will hold you close. I will protect you from the world. I will never let you suffer." A strange, quiet peace settled over my chest. It was over. This life had been far too exhausting anyway. If there was an after... I prayed with every dying ember of my soul that our paths would never cross again. ... At St. Jude’s Memorial Hospital, Jasper Lawrence didn't leave Lacey’s bedside for forty-eight hours. He barely slept, nursing cups of black coffee, watching her monitor with haunted eyes. On the third afternoon, his phone chimed on the nightstand with an emergency news alert. "BREAKING: Trans-Atlantic Flight 804 to Zurich suffered catastrophic engine failure shortly after departure. The aircraft went down over open water. Search and rescue confirms zero survivors."