Chapter 1
The handsome fireman was the town’s favorite figure. A tall man with deep grey eyes, a chiseled face that wore a friendly expression, and a golden heart underneath; such a rarity that people called Jasmine, “lucky” when she married the fireman. Their encounter was literally fiery, when Ms. Jasmine who was about to be engulfed in flames, was saved by an angel in a red helmet and, a date followed, once the trauma receded. But the days of her paradise were countable, and the once bubbly Jasmine now walked numb, horrified, almost like a dead woman. Every day people would sing praises of the fireman, hoping to make Jasmine feel good, but any trace of a smile was long gone. As Jasmine sat in her car beside the smiling fireman, she recalled how she couldn’t figure out that familiar smile of the fireman when they first met. The smile, which is inherited by siblings or sometimes half-siblings; the smile which hid the demon beneath, who lit her father’s office that day, unaware of her existence. A tear escapes as she imagines a world in which her marriage was not a sham plotted to kill her slowly, out of revenge; an endless revenge inherited by half-siblings, a revenge which ultimately led her to accidentally push the devious fireman off the cliff, a revenge which the apparition of the fireman sitting beside her now takes every day.
