Author: Momo Chan

1 After I was released from prison, I took a job as a per diem nursing aide at Saint Jude’s Memorial, emptying bedpans and wiping soiled skin just to scrape together enough for cochlear implant surgery. That was where I ran into Eleanor Montgomery. She froze in the doorway of room 412, paralyzed by the sight of me. To her, I was still the haughty, brittle heiress who once shattered crystal flutes when crossed; she clearly couldn’t reconcile that ghost with the woman now kneeling on institutional linoleum, smiling politely while emptying a paraplegic man’s catheter bag. “Nora?” Her voice caught, thin and incredulous. “What… what are you doing here? Doing this?” I gave her a flat, unhurried glance, then went back to securing the drainage valve with gloved hands. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t speak. It wasn’t until I stripped off my latex gloves and stepped into the corridor that she hurried after me, her low heels clicking against the waxed floor. Her eyes were rimmed with red. “Nora, please. Why aren’t you painting anymore?” She reached toward me, her manicured fingers trembling in midair. “Do you… do you still hate me that much?” My knuckles tightened against the clipboard. Facing away from her, I shook my head in silence. The day Eleanor Montgomery had her attorneys walk into the precinct and hand over statements that sealed my indictment, I learned a simple truth: hatred is a luxury reserved for people with trust funds and social standing. Now, I had neither. I was a convicted felon with sixty-two dollars in my checking account and a ruined body. All I wanted was to stay as far away from the Montgomery family as humanly possible. By the time my shift ended, an early winter blizzard had blanketed the city in wet, heavy slush. A miserable queue snaked along the curb at the crosstown bus stop. I stood near the rusted shelter, stamping my feet in thin canvas boots, tucking my raw red hands under my armpits while straining my neck to watch for headlights through the blinding flurries. My breath bloomed in ragged clouds. A sleek black Rolls-Royce Ghost pulled smoothly to the curb, its tires cutting through the gray sludge. The tinted rear passenger window slid down with a faint mechanical purr, releasing a draft of rich leather and warm, climate-controlled cedar. Eleanor Montgomery sat in the back, wrapped in a plush shearling coat, her sculpted, elegant face framed by diamond studs. “Nora, get in,” she urged, her voice tight with strain. “Let me take you home.” I glanced down at my prepaid phone. The freezing temperatures had drained the remaining battery; the screen went pitch-black. Without a second thought, I pulled open the front passenger door and climbed in. The penitentiary had cured me of pride years ago. Pride doesn’t keep frostbite out of your toes, and it doesn’t quiet the gnawing ache in your stomach. The two dollars and seventy-five cents I saved on bus fare tonight meant I could buy a hot deli sandwich and two eggs for breakfast. Behind the wheel, Arthur, the family’s longtime chauffeur, offered me a tentative, mournful smile in the rearview mirror. He immediately cranked the blower, directing the vent right at my shivering knees. “Miss Nora,” he murmured, his voice thick with nostalgia. “You used to love the snow. You and Master Patrick would spend hours in the back gardens, building an entire army of snowmen until your mittens were soaked through.” My hands paused on the cheap wool scarf wrapped around my neck. I looked out at the grimy snow piling against the highway guardrails, feeling a dull ache behind my temples. I hated snow now. Snow meant dampness leaking through the paper-thin drywall of my basement studio apartment. Snow meant transit delays, and transit delays meant a docked attendance bonus on my paycheck. When I didn’t reply, Arthur let out a heavy sigh. “If Master Patrick woke up and saw how grounded and poised you’ve become… he’d be so proud.” The interior of the car fell dead silent. Even Eleanor, who had been leaning forward as if searching for words, closed her eyes and sank back into the upholstery, turning her head toward the darkened glass. Patrick’s vegetative state was an unhealed, jagged wound in the Montgomery household. And I was the one who had paid the blood price for it. The city thinned out, the glittering commercial avenues giving way to cracked asphalt, shuttered bodegas, and flickering streetlights. When the neon sign of the twenty-four-hour laundromat came into view, I tapped the dashboard. “Drop me at the corner, Arthur.” Arthur pulled over next to a row of derelict, pre-war walk-ups. Through the window, Eleanor stared in horror at the narrow alleyway, the overflowing dumpsters, and the peeling paint of the tenements. “Nora…” Her breath caught, trembling with disbelief. “You… you live here? In a place like this?” I pulled my thin puffer coat tightly across my chest and kept my tone matter-of-fact. “The rent is cheap.” Eleanor choked back a sound, her composure splintering. When she spoke again, her voice shook. “Why didn’t you come home after you were released? Why didn’t you come find me?” I pushed the door open, stepped into the slush, and turned back to shut it with practiced care. “Mrs. Montgomery,” I said quietly, “I stopped being a Montgomery a very long time ago.” Her face went entirely bloodless. Before I could take three steps into the falling snow, the rear door swung open. Eleanor scrambled out into the bitter gale, heedless of the freezing slush ruining her designer pumps. “Nora!” she cried out desperately. “The day after tomorrow is my birthday. Would you… could you just have dinner with me? Just one dinner?” I didn’t turn around. I pulled my hood low and kept walking into the squall, though my mind involuntarily drifted back ten years, to my fifteenth birthday. That had been my first birthday after being brought back into the Montgomery estate. With naive, pathetic yearning, I had asked Eleanor that morning if she might stay home and share a cake with me. She had merely nodded with distracted indifference—and an hour later, she swept out the front doors to take Hailey on a whirlwind shopping spree to Manhattan. I had sat alone in that cavernous, marble dining hall from noon until dusk, and from midnight until sunrise. The candles melted down into deformed lumps of wax over a grocery-store sponge cake while the housekeepers whispered and smirked in the pantry, their snide mockery drifting through the cracked doors. When Eleanor finally returned the next morning, laughing softly as she draped a designer cashmere wrap over Hailey’s shoulders, the humiliation inside me shattered like glass. I broke down. I screamed. I wept until I choked, asking Eleanor why Hailey was the only daughter she ever saw, why Hailey got everything while I got nothing. Eleanor had recoiled in absolute disgust, ripping her sleeve from my grip. “Nora Montgomery,” she had snapped coldly, “you don’t deserve it.” I had stood frozen, struck dumb, unable to fathom what monstrous sin I had committed to make my own mother despise me so thoroughly. When Patrick caught wind of the scene, he took the next red-eye flight back from his prep school abroad. He had sat on the edge of my bed, jet-lagged and hollow-eyed with guilt, speaking in that gentle, appeasing cadence he always used when trying to mend impossible things. “Nora, listen to me,” he had pleaded softly. “When you were taken from that playground at four years old, Mom suffered a complete psychiatric collapse from the guilt. She spent two years in an inpatient facility. When she finally visited that state orphanage and saw Hailey, she convinced herself Hailey was her lost little Brooke. It was the only thing that brought her back to reality.” He had rubbed his tired eyes, sighing. “Dad legally adopted Hailey and gave her your birth name, Brooke. For eleven years, Mom poured her entire soul into her. If we abruptly told her the truth, the doctors said she’d relapse. Can you… can you try to understand what Mom and I are dealing with? In her mind, loving Hailey is loving you.” And so, my identity was stripped away. I wasn’t allowed to be Brooke Montgomery anymore; I was rechristened Nora, shoved into the guest wing under the legal guise of an “adopted daughter.” Nora. An afterthought. A polite visitor who was explicitly warned never to disturb the fragile domestic bliss of their manufactured family. Seeing my fingernails biting crescent moons into my palms, Patrick had sighed, reaching into his carry-on bag to pull out a silver-wrapped box with a satin bow. “Happy birthday, Nora.” I hadn’t taken it. My eyes had locked onto the identical silver package resting right beside it in his bag. Patrick’s expression had grown awkward. “That one… is for Brooke. You’re both my sisters. I have to treat you equally.” He wanted to be fair. But in a house built on theft, his brand of fairness was the cruellest injustice imaginable. While I was being beaten with electrical cords by child traffickers in the rural backwoods, scavenging for scraps and clawing my way through nightmares just to escape, Hailey Barnes was sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets under my name, eating off silver spoons, and inheriting my mother’s devotion. While I fought to find my way home, they had already replaced me with a shiny, unbroken substitute. Yet, back then, I had been so starved for affection that even Patrick’s diluted, compromised warmth felt like water in a desert. I clung to it like a lifeline, terrified that if I let go, I would drown in the dark. A stray gust blew ice crystals against my burning cheeks. I shook myself from the past and hurried up the freezing concrete stairwell to my third-floor room. Inside, I plugged my phone into the wall charger. The screen flickered to life, immediately buzzing with an incoming contact notification. The screen read: [New message request from: Mom.] I stared at the glowing letters for two seconds, then swiped thumb across the screen and hit Decline. It didn’t surprise me that she had my private number. With the Montgomery resources, a private investigator could track down my burner phone in twenty minutes. What puzzled me was the performance. For years, she had looked at me as though she wished I had rotted in a ditch; why play the penitent mother now? Aside from a ruined right wrist and a pair of broken ears, I had nothing left for her to strip away and hand to Hailey. I told myself Eleanor Montgomery no longer had the power to hurt me, but my subconscious betrayed me. That night, I plunged headlong into the old nightmares. In the dream, I was seven again, locked in a windowless toolshed in the Appalachians, fighting a feral hound for a crust of moldy cornbread. My skin was a roadmap of purple contusions and weeping burns. Every time the pain pushed me toward unconsciousness, only one thought kept my heart beating: I have to go home. Mom and Dad are waiting for me. Patrick is looking for me. If I die here, they’ll die of heartbreak. I can’t break their hearts. But when I finally crawled back to the gates of the suburban estate, dirt caked under my skin, there was no room left at the table. Eleanor stood at the top of the grand spiral staircase, looking down at my ragged thrift-store clothes with an expression of visceral recoil that cut deeper than any belt. Beside her stood Hailey, glowing in a cream velvet dress, diamond studs gleaming in her small ears. Hailey had tilted her head, whining playfully against Eleanor’s arm. “Mom, look at what Patrick dragged in from the street. Is he seriously keeping that stray here to play with me?” I had looked up in fury, but the moment my eyes fell on Hailey’s pristine, buffed manicure, shame had flooded my throat. I had shoved my own hands—gnarled, raw, with half the fingernails torn away from picking locks—deep into my pockets. Life at the estate had been a slow, quiet suffocation. Eleanor’s cold neglect, Hailey’s calculated cruelty, and the domestic staff’s open contempt wore away at my sanity like acid. I swallowed the venom until the summer of my senior year, when I overheard Hailey laughing with her prep-school clique in the conservatory, claiming I was the filthy illegitimate daughter of Eleanor’s deceased brother, a pathetic charity case living off scraps. Something inside me snapped. In front of fifty prominent socialites gathered for high tea, I charged across the lawn and tackled Hailey into the rose bushes, screaming the truth at the top of my lungs—that Hailey was nothing but an orphan from a county shelter, a fraud living a stolen life. Humiliated before the entire country club set, Hailey staged a theatrical swoon, collapsing onto the grass. Eleanor had rushed forward, cradling Hailey against her designer silk blouse, and turned on me with eyes so full of murderous venom I thought she might tear me apart with her bare hands. “Nora Montgomery, you are no daughter of mine!” Eleanor had shrieked, her voice echoing across the manicured lawn. “I have only one daughter, and her name is Brooke!” She had swept away with Hailey in her arms, leaving me standing in the center of the terrace while fifty pairs of aristocratic eyes watched in disgust, whispering, laughing behind linen napkins. I had stood there, remembering how, when I was four years old, Eleanor used to rock me by the nursery fireplace, whispering that I was her greatest treasure, promising that even if the world tore us apart, she would recognize her baby girl anywhere. You didn’t recognize me, I thought in the dark of my freezing room. You didn’t even want to look. After that disastrous garden party, high society branded me an uncontrollable delinquent, while Hailey was celebrated as a gracious, long-suffering saint. I stopped attending family dinners. I retreated to the attic studio, locking the heavy oak door and painting eighteen hours a day until my fingers cramped around the brushes. Patrick had returned from Oxford, had a series of screaming arguments with Eleanor behind closed mahogany doors, and then brought me professional-grade Belgian canvases, Kolinsky sable brushes, and an unlimited Centurion card. “Don’t hold it against Mom, Nora,” he had pleaded, his hands resting on my shoulders. “She’s fragile. Her mind isn’t right. Just be patient. Be good. Once she sees how talented and obedient you are, she’ll come around.” So I tried. I forced down my fury, stayed quiet, and tried to earn Eleanor’s love. But Eleanor only saw my quietness as cold calculation. She accused me of playing mind games to drive a wedge between her and her son. The stricter she became, the more she shut me out. I only opened the studio door when Patrick came home. He tried his best, but he was ascending the ranks of the family enterprise, buried in corporate takeovers. His hurried visits could not patch the yawning crater in my chest. I knew I had to get out. My only salvation lay in the Prix de Jeunesse, an international fine arts competition. The grand prize was a two-hundred-thousand-dollar grant and a four-year fellowship at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For four months, I barely slept. I poured every drop of grief, rage, and survival onto a massive six-foot canvas, producing a masterpiece of haunting, fractured realism. On the day of the regional submission, I arrived at the gallery only to find my painting already hanging beneath the spotlights—credited exclusively to Brooke Montgomery. I pulled out my phone and played the studio’s cloud-synced security feed right in front of the board of jurors, exposing Hailey as a thief who had broken into my workspace at midnight to forge her signature over mine. Hailey’s face morphed into frantic terror. When the jurors began murmuring in disgust, she buried her face in her hands, hyperventilating until she dropped dramatically to the parquet floor. Eleanor dropped to her knees, gathering Hailey against her chest, and swung her arm back to deliver a crack across my jaw that sent me stumbling into the gallery partition. “If anything happens to Brooke,” Eleanor hissed through gritted teeth, “I swear to God I will destroy you!” By the following morning, the Montgomery legal team had issued a sweeping press release claiming the video footage was an AI-generated deepfake orchestrated by an emotionally unstable ward of the family. Hailey rallied her social media following, unleashing a wave of doxxing and digital harassment that painted me as a deranged stalker. I refused to roll over. I compiled the hard-drive metadata, the security logs, and the original sketches, stuffing them into a leather folio to take to the central police precinct. I never made it past the driveway. Four private security guards hired by Eleanor intercepted me at the iron gates, their orders explicit: transport me involuntarily to an inpatient psychiatric facility upstate to protect Hailey’s burgeoning career. When I fought back, clawing and kicking like an animal, one of the guards twisted my right arm behind my back and slammed my wrist against the stone balustrade with a sickening crack. Agony like liquid fire tore through my arm. I looked up through blinding tears, screaming for Eleanor. She stood on the grand front portico, wrapped in her cashmere coat, her arms folded, watching with stone-cold detachment as they dragged me across the gravel toward the black van. The van doors were about to slam shut when Patrick’s Porsche tore through the gates, skidding sideways across the drive. He leaped out, throwing his body between me and the guards. He had spent the last twenty-four hours digging through city archives and hospital records. He didn’t just fire the guards on the spot; he marched into the foyer and threw the original missing-person police report from twelve years ago, alongside the state adoption decree for Hailey Barnes, right onto the marble console in front of Eleanor. “She isn’t an impostor, Mom!” Patrick roared, his voice cracking with fury. “Nora is Brooke! She is your biological daughter!” Eleanor stared at the documents, her eyes wide with shock, refusing to accept the reality staring her in the face. Then Patrick dropped a flash drive containing phone recordings onto the table. “And this is Hailey bribing your security detail to snap Nora’s painting wrist. If you ever lay a hand on my sister again, Hailey, you are out of this family.” Hailey broke down in theatrical hysterics, throwing herself at Eleanor’s knees, sobbing like an injured child. “Mom, I’m sorry! I was just so terrified… I thought you’d throw me away once you found out… I thought you didn’t love me anymore…” Watching Hailey weep, Eleanor looked as though her heart had been ripped from her ribs. She turned on Patrick, her voice rising into an unhinged scream. “If there was a mistake, then let it stay a mistake! If I am only allowed to have one daughter in this life, it will be Brooke! If you throw her out of this house, Patrick, I walk out with her!” Eleanor cast one final, venomous glare in my direction. In that freezing foyer, cradling my mangled, broken wrist against my ribs, the physical agony couldn’t compare to the cold, dead hollow opening inside my chest. I woke with a violent jolt, my right wrist throbbing with phantom electricity. A glance at the alarm clock sent cold panic through my veins. It was the final day of the month; if I clocked in even three minutes late, my entire monthly punctuality bonus would vanish. I threw on my scrubs, grabbed my winter coat, and bolted down the rickety stairs into the biting wind. At the curb, the black Rolls-Royce was idling, exhaust pluming white into the freezing air. Eleanor stood beside the rear fender, a dusting of snow clinging to the dark fur of her mink coat. Her skin was pale, her lips chapped from the cold. The moment she saw me, she hurried forward, her gloved hands reaching out. “Nora, the roads are iced over. Please, let me drive you to the hospital.” I slid my hand away from her grip, murmuring a curt, neutral “Thank you,” and opened the front passenger door as if getting into an Uber. Arthur greeted me with an anxious, solicitous smile, immediately handing me an insulated travel mug. “Miss Nora, the Madam had the kitchen prepare this fresh. She was worried you wouldn’t have time for breakfast.” The scalding metal stung against my frostbitten fingers. I looked down at the embossed gold crest on the lid, but didn’t open it. Eleanor leaned forward from the backseat, her brows furrowed in timid concern. “Nora, you always loved hot vanilla milk. Why aren’t you drinking it?” I stared at the steam venting through the lid and replied evenly, “I’m lactose intolerant. And vanilla milk was Hailey’s preference, not mine.” Eleanor opened her mouth to protest. “That’s not true. When you lived at the house, you drank a cup every single night before bed—” She cut herself off. The blood drained from her face. Memory struck her like a slap. She remembered. One night, around two in the morning, I had knocked frantically on her master suite door, my lips purple, my throat closing, my face covered in severe hives, gasping for her to call 911. Assuming I had brought some contagious, low-class filth into her clean house, Eleanor had shoved me into the hallway, locked her door, and packed Hailey into an SUV at three in the morning to decamp to their country estate, terrified I would infect her precious child. I had dialed 911 myself from the kitchen floor. During my four-day stay in the ICU, Eleanor never once called. The remainder of the ride was suffocatingly quiet. It was only when Arthur pulled into the hospital’s circular ambulance bay that Eleanor found her voice again, fragile and pleading. “Nora… Patrick’s neurologist called this morning. His recent EEGs show increased cortical activity. He might wake up. Won’t you please come up to the private wing with me to see him?” She leaned closer, tears welling in her eyes. “Your brother… he loved you more than anyone. If he hears your voice, if you talk to him, it might bring him back. Please.” My hand froze on the chrome door handle. Patrick’s final, fading words before the abyss flashed across my memory, leaving an acrid taste in my mouth. “I can’t,” I said rasply. “I have a shift to cover.” “Then let me hire you!” Eleanor cried, completely shedding her aristocratic poise. She lunged forward, grabbing my forearm with both hands, her voice breaking into a ragged sob. “Be his private nurse. Name your rate. Ten thousand a week? Twenty thousand? Whatever you want, Nora, just come!” “Let go of me, Mrs. Montgomery.” “Do you hate us that much?” she wept, clutching my sleeve like a drowning woman. “You won’t call me Mom, you won’t step foot in the house… are you really going to abandon your own brother, too?” I twisted around to pry her fingers off my coat, desperate to tell her that I had no energy left for hate, that staying alive took every scrap of breath I had. But she pulled back in panic, her manicured nails catching against the side of my head. A tiny piece of molded beige plastic tore free and bounced off the pavement with a sharp, hollow clatter. The sound cut off instantly. The world plunged into a muffled, watery silence. Eleanor stared down at the small hearing aid lying in the dirty slush, her jaw trembling in absolute horror. “Nora…” Her voice reached me as a distorted, low-frequency hum. “Why are you wearing a hearing aid? What… what did they do to you in prison?” I looked at her, my expression completely flat. She was the one who had instructed her legal team to “make an example” of me, ensuring I was assigned to a maximum-security state facility known for its brutal yard culture. What was the point of this sudden, weeping innocence? I refused to give her an audience. Crouching down, I picked the hearing aid out of the gray sludge, wiped the receiver dry against my scrubs, and fitted it back into my ear canal. The shrill hum of feedback screeched before stabilizing into the dull hum of morning traffic. Without looking back, I pushed through the emergency sliding glass doors. Behind me, the muffled sound of Eleanor’s choked sobs dissolved into the wail of approaching sirens. I spent five minutes in the locker room splashing cold water on my face, straightened my smock, and headed up to the third-floor orthopedics ward. When I opened the door to room 314, my previous bedbound patient was gone. Sitting comfortably on the private suite’s leather recliner was Hailey Barnes, one slender leg crossed over the other, sipping an iced matcha latte. The moment she saw me turn to leave, she set the cup down with a light, mocking snicker. “Well, well. Look at the little Montgomery princess,” Hailey purred, her voice dripping with venom. “Down to scrubbing toilets and wiping strangers’ asses for a living. I told you, Nora. You cross me, and you end up in the sewer.” My face showed nothing. Hailey’s eyes flashed with annoyance at my lack of reaction, but her lips curled into a smirk. “Don’t bother looking for your supervisor. I just signed an exclusive private-duty care agreement with the agency. As of ten minutes ago, I am your primary client. You do whatever I tell you to do. Understand?” My phone buzzed in my scrub pocket. I glanced down. It was a text from the agency coordinator: Montgomery client requested you specifically. Rate is double standard per diem. Bonus already deposited to your account. Double pay. I locked the phone, smoothed down my apron, and assumed a posture of neutral, deferential professionalism. “What do you need, Miss Montgomery?” Hailey’s smile widened, triumphant. For the next four hours, she ran me ragged. She made me take a paring knife and pick every individual black seed out of two pints of fresh strawberries. She made me haul steaming water in a washbasin to scrub her pedicured feet, then complained the water was too hot and kicked the basin, spilling soapy water all over my scrub pants. Through it all, I didn’t utter a single complaint. I dried the floor, picked the seeds, and emptied the basin. Seeing that her petty cruelties couldn’t break my dead-eyed composure, Hailey’s frustration curdled into raw, twitching malice. During the busy lunch rush, she casually brushed past me near the linen cart, slipping something heavy and metallic into the deep front pocket of my smock. Two seconds later, she lunged out into the bustling hallway, pointing a trembling, manicured finger at me and screaming at the top of her lungs. “Security! She stole it! Nora Montgomery stole my bracelet!” Visitors, doctors, and nurses froze in their tracks. A crowd formed in seconds, circling the doorway. Hailey fell against the doorframe, tears spilling down her cheeks in a masterclass of wounded innocence. “Nora, I know you served time!” Hailey wept, loud enough for the entire wing to hear. “I thought you had reformed. I hired you specifically to help you get back on your feet! How could you do this to me? If you needed money, you could have just asked! But that Cartier bracelet was a custom birthday gift from my mother! Please, just give it back!” Murmurs rippled through the onlookers like wildfire. “A felon? They hired an ex-con to work the private suites?” “I know her, she took care of my uncle last month. She seemed so quiet and hardworking… you really can never tell with criminals.” “Once a thief, always a thief.” Hailey watched me with veiled triumph, expecting the old Nora—the Nora who would scream, throw things, and look like an unhinged maniac to everyone in the room. Instead, I reached into my pocket, pulled out the heavy gold cuff, and held it up by two fingers. Then, with my other hand, I brought out my smartphone. The red recording indicator on the top corner was blinking steadily. “I didn’t steal your bracelet, Miss Montgomery,” I said, my voice cutting through the corridor with cool clarity. “And if you want to file a police report, please do. My phone has been recording continuously from the front pocket of my scrub top since I clocked in. The camera angle captures everything within a hundred and eighty degrees, including the exact moment your right hand slipped this into my pocket.” Hailey’s face went rigid. The color drained from her cheeks in a single breath. She looked at the phone, then at the gathered crowd, who were already whispering in a very different tone. “I… well,” Hailey stammered, waving her hand with forced carelessness. “Since the bracelet has been recovered, I won’t waste the police’s time. We’ll drop it.” She turned on her heel to retreat into the suite. “Apologize, Hailey.” Hailey stopped dead. She spun back around, her voice shrill with outrage. “What did you say?” “You just publicly accused an employee of felony grand larceny,” I said, stepping forward. “Apologize to me.” Hailey’s face flushed an ugly, mottled crimson. “Apologize to you? Do you know who I am? Do you want me to call Eleanor right now and have you blacklisted from every hospital in the state?” I tilted my head, letting a cold, razor-thin smile touch my lips. “You should definitely call her,” I said softly. “Considering she spent the last forty-eight hours begging me on her knees to move back to the estate… what do you think would happen if I told her my only condition was having you thrown out on the street?”

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1 “Baby, you taste too sweet right here. I can’t stop…” Nobody would ever believe that the man tangled in the sheets with me wasn’t my husband. Across the entire base, from the command tents to the officers’ club, everyone knew the truth: Colonel Garret Mercer would rather rack out on a cot in the tactical field compound than spend a single night in the marital bed with his lawful wife. Every single week, the whispers rippled through the officers’ row like wildfire. When is poor Mrs. Mercer going to break her streak as the base’s most dutiful celibate widow? Whenever those rumors reached his ears, Garret never flinched. He simply swept his cold, hooded eyes over me, his voice stripped of anything resembling warmth. “If you really can’t stomach it, go find someone on the outside. We can each play our own games.” The words barely had time to settle before he adjusted his dress uniform and strode out the door. That very night, intimate photos of him and his newest conquest were leaked across the base’s private intranet. Everyone on the post assumed I would sit in the dark, crying my eyes out until sunrise. Instead, I picked up my phone and dialed an old contact over in base public affairs, telling him I had an exclusive scoop. After I hung up, I pulled my collar askew, ruffled the duvet into a knot of feverish disarray, and snapped a suggestive, shadowed shot from a third-person angle. I sent it straight to Garret’s personal number from a burner: [Colonel Mercer, your wife tastes incredible. Be sure to let me know the second the divorce goes through.] Knowing the story had already gone live across the base network, I pulled the covers up, ready to get some sleep. Less than twenty minutes later, the hall floorboards groaned under heavy, furious combat boots. “Nora Miller! Is this how you get your petty revenge? Who the hell is the man in that photo!” A stack of glossy prints slammed onto the mattress in front of me, scattering across the sheets. Half of them were blurry, sweat-dampened snapshots of my unmade bed. The other half showed Garret, his back pinned against the corridor wall of the tactical headquarters, kissing Ivy Miller like he was starving. It was the exact piece I’d asked my contact to run. Headline: The Mercers Reach an Understanding: An Open Marriage, Zero Interference. I sat up on the edge of the mattress, casually drawing the loose lapels of my robe together. “Isn’t this the exact arrangement you asked for?” I looked straight into his dark, bloodshot eyes. “Your only mistake was dragging my dignity through the mud just to sleep with my father’s bastard daughter.” Garret’s breath hitched. For a second, his jaw tightened so hard I could hear his molars grind, but he sidestepped the accusation entirely. “Who is he?” he snarled through clenched teeth. “You don’t need to know,” I said smoothly. “That’s what makes it fair.” Once upon a time, I was the kind of woman who hired private investigators to track down every single female aide and contractor who stepped into his orbit. I was young, sharp-edged, and proud; I couldn’t bear a single grain of dirt in my marriage. Then reality caught up with me. Before I could even finish vetting one woman, another two had already taken her place in his bed. Eventually, I grew too exhausted to keep playing the warden. A low, sinister laugh rumbled in Garret’s chest. “You really think you’re brave, don’t you?” Before the words left his lips, his gaze caught the purple bruise blooming beneath my collarbone. His pupils dilated. In an instant, his heavy frame came crashing down, pinning me flat against the mattress. I fought him with everything I had, scratching and thrashing, screaming into his face. The cold edge of a tactical folding knife flashed in the lamplight, slicing a shallow, searing line straight through the skin of my collarbone. Warm blood welled immediately, washing over that faint purple shadow. “You’re out of your goddamn mind! Get off me!” Garret held me pinned beneath his deadweight, veins bulging along his temples, his eyes feral and crimson. “This is the first time, and it’s the last time,” he hissed, his hot breath stinging my cheek. “I’m having the post taken down. Before I lose what’s left of my control, Nora, you’d better learn your place.” Learning my place. To him, that meant sitting quietly while explicit photos of him and his mistresses circulated among the brass. It meant opening anonymous packages delivered to our front porch—packages containing stained lace thongs and used, sticky prophylactics—and filing them away without a whisper of complaint. Garret’s venomous gaze bore into mine for what felt like hours. It wasn’t until he saw the silent, involuntary tears spilling down my temples from the raw sting of the cut that his grip finally loosened. He pushed off me, moved to the nightstand, and yanked open the drawer to grab the trauma kit. The moment his fingers touched my skin, I shoved him back with all my strength. “Don’t you touch me!” Garret straightened up from the bed, his expression shuttering into pure ice. “You staged this whole damn circus just to get a rise out of me, didn’t you? And now you want to play the martyr?” His lip curled with absolute disdain. “Humiliating yourself just to get my attention—is that really all you’re capable of?” In his careless rage, the blade still gripped in his fingers grazed the soft underside of my forearm. Blood welled instantly, soaking into the olive-drab military sheets beneath me. Cold sweat broke out across my forehead from the sharp flare of pain. Yet the ache tearing through my ribcage was a thousand times more brutal than anything metal could do to flesh. Garret stared down at me, his eyes dead and unreadable. “My mother was right about you,” he said, each syllable dropping like lead. “A girl from a nobody background is always going to pull cheap, back-alley stunts. If you actually have the spine for it, divorce me. Stop hiring actors to make me jealous. Your sister has ten times the class you’ll ever have.” He threw the knife onto the side table and slammed the bedroom door behind him. Less than twenty minutes later, my phone lit up on the nightstand with an email notification: a digital divorce decree, already signed with Garret Mercer’s bold, angular signature. The asset division was startling. Seventy percent to me, thirty percent to him. He was still entirely convinced that I was bluffing—that no woman like me would ever willingly walk away from the prestige of being a Colonel’s wife. Without a second’s hesitation, I applied my digital signature to the line, hit submit, and dialed a number I had memorized weeks ago. “It’s done,” I whispered into the receiver. “Confirm the flight time.” Garret, I thought as the line clicked dead, what made you so certain the man in that photograph wasn’t real? Once the call ended, the tears I had swallowed down finally broke through, hot and silent against the blood-stained pillow. Five years ago, when Garret Mercer insisted on putting a ring on my finger, the entire world stood against us. His old-money military family sneered at my civilian roots, and the brass nearly stalled his promotion to full colonel over the optics. But he weathered every bit of blowback. He gave me a picture-perfect ceremony at the post chapel, swords arched overhead, white lilies lining every pew. Back then, every officer’s wife whispered that Nora Miller was the luckiest girl on the eastern seaboard. The trouble was, I wasn’t the only woman who coveted the base’s golden boy. On our wedding night, an emergency scramble order dragged him away before we could even uncork the champagne. He never came back to our quarters that night. I sat alone on the edge of our pristine king bed, watching the darkness give way to pale gray dawn. Around sunrise, he returned smelling of stale smoke and cordite. He walked into the bedroom, patted my head like I was a loyal retriever, and said calmly, “What’s rare about you, Nora, is that you’re sensible. You don’t cause problems. The Mercer family needs a woman who knows how to hold the fort.” In that single breath, the romantic fire I had nurtured for years was doused in freezing water. So, I learned how to be sensible. I didn’t nag. I didn’t complain. I became the quiet, decorative ghost of the Mercer residence. And now, of all the women in the world, he had chosen Ivy Miller. The one person on this earth I truly hated. Years ago, my father had brought Ivy through our front door, demanding that my mother accept his illegitimate daughter under our roof. My mother, a woman who carried herself with quiet, aristocratic grace, held me tightly against her side. She didn’t yell. She didn’t cry. She simply gave my father two clear options: either he sent Ivy away immediately, or she would take me and walk out of his life forever. My father said nothing. He walked out onto the high-rise balcony and stood in the cold night air until dawn. When he finally stepped back inside, my mother was already gone. She had stepped off the ledge into the empty air. It was pouring rain that morning. The deluge washed the dark red streaks from the concrete below before the coroner even arrived. Garret had rushed to the scene in uniform. He pulled me into his arms while I broke down, letting me hammer my fists against his chest until my knuckles bruised, repeating the same words over and over: “It’s okay, Nora. I’ve got you. It’s okay…” And now, he had made that very same girl the center of his universe. What dignity did Mrs. Mercer have left? Garret didn’t come home that night. True to his word, the headline I had leaked vanished from the base’s servers before midnight, scrubbed clean by administrative command. Instead, he escorted Ivy to the annual officers’ gala on his arm, seating her squarely in the chair reserved for his wife. He even took the podium to announce a lavish birthday bash for Ivy the following evening, extending an open invitation to every officer and spouse on post. He knew damn well that Ivy’s birthday was the exact anniversary of my mother’s death. He was sending a message. He wanted to rub my nose in the dirt—to remind me that a girl from my station could never truly stand as his equal. Around noon the next day, a medic from the base clinic knocked on my door to dress the gouge on my collarbone. “The Colonel personally signed the requisition for these advanced tissue-healing ointments, ma’am,” the young specialist murmured, keeping his eyes on the bandages. “He knows your skin scars easily. He really does care about you.” A dry, bitter laugh escaped my throat. I didn’t say a word. The moment the medic packed his kit and left, my phone buzzed with an incoming video file from an unknown sender. On the screen, Ivy was sobbing hysterically in my father’s living room: “I only went to the balcony to beg her to accept me! But she grabbed me, Dad, she screamed that I was dirty, that I didn’t deserve to step foot in this house! We got into a fight, and I shoved her… it was an accident, I swear it was self-defense! Dad… Garret… what am I going to do?” On the screen, Ivy slapped herself violently across the face, weeping apologies to my mother’s memory. My ears rang with a deafening, metallic pitch. The room tilted. In the frame, my father’s hand swung out, catching Ivy across the cheek. He doubled over, clutching his chest, gasping for breath. “How could I raise a monster like you! That was my wife!” Ivy raised her swollen face, staring desperately past my father toward a tall figure standing near the window. Toward Garret’s back. “You’ll help me, won’t you, Garret? You care about me… you told me you did.” A long, suffocating silence hung over the recording. My heart climbed into my throat, beating so hard it bruised my ribs. Then, Garret turned. His expression was shadowed, impenetrable, but his tone was steady as steel: “Get your passport ready. Lay low in Europe for a few months. I’ll handle the detectives at the precinct.” Every syllable struck me like a hollow-point bullet. The entire world had conspired to lie to me about how my mother died. My father. And the man I had trusted with my entire life. Five years ago, when I had run out into the storm to file a formal homicide report, Garret had sped through the rain to intercept me. His truck had hydroplaned, rolling into the ditch. He had crawled out of the shattered windshield, covered in blood, his hand locking onto my ankle in the mud. “Nora, go home. Leave this to me. I’ll make sure justice is served.” I had been stupid enough to believe him. I had clung to the belief that my mother would never leave me so cruelly of her own free will. And all this time, my father and my husband had been guarding her killer. That evening, hollowed out and pale as a ghost, I walked into the ballroom for Ivy’s birthday celebration. Ivy stood under the crystal chandeliers, draped in an emerald evening gown, her hand resting casually on Garret’s forearm. She was intentionally catching the light on a rare jade bangle he had clearly bought for her—acting as if she were already the undisputed mistress of the Mercer name. The second I crossed the threshold, the room fell dead silent. Hundreds of eyes turned toward me, thick with condescension, pity, and thinly veiled disgust. Only Garret looked relaxed. A smug, proprietary smirk touched the corners of his mouth. He assumed I had finally broken—that I was arriving to grovel and sue for peace, just like I always did. He even shifted his stance, opening his arms slightly to receive me. He was about to be sorely disappointed. I walked straight to the center of the floor, my voice carrying clearly over the muted strings of the quartet: “Garret Mercer. Ivy pushed my mother off that balcony, didn’t she? And you covered it up like an accomplice.” The air was sucked out of the room. Garret’s chest hitched. A flicker of naked panic flicked across his features, gone in a fraction of a second, replaced by iron authority. “Nora, this is Ivy’s birthday. Don’t make an embarrassment of yourself.” Before I could breathe, my father lunged forward from the VIP table, his palm cracking violently across my cheek. The sting flared hot on my skin, but it was the silent, warning look my father exchanged with Garret that gutted me completely. The video was real. Every horrific second of it. At that moment, Ivy threw herself toward me, tears spilling down her cheeks in a practiced torrent. “Nora… I know Eleanor never liked me, but we’re sisters! We’re all the family each other has left! Please stop punishing me like this… I won’t hold anything you did to me in the past against you, I swear! I’ll do whatever you say!” As she whimpered, she pulled back her silk sleeve, deliberately exposing a cluster of faint, jagged scars along her forearm for the room to see. Garret’s brow furrowed in acute protective rage. He looked down at me as if I were vermin. “Nora Miller, she’s your sister! How could you be so vicious to your own blood?” Gasps rippled through the gathering of wives and junior officers. “I knew Eleanor Miller was unhinged, but to raise a daughter this cruel? She probably slipped trying to attack the poor girl.” “Shameless. Fabricating a murder charge just to keep the Colonel on a leash? Five years without a kid—she’s completely warped in the head.” “What do you expect from white-trash stock? You can dress them up, but the rot always comes out.” The venom poured over me in waves. In my mind, all I could see was my mother’s body broken on the rainy asphalt, her blood washing down the storm drain while these two men looked away. The red haze took over. Before anyone could register my movement, I lunged forward, my fingers locking around Ivy’s delicate throat. “You give my mother her life back!” Ivy choked, clawing at my wrists, her eyes bulging with theatrical terror. A split second later, a massive, unyielding force slammed into my shoulder, tearing me away and knocking me to the polished parquet floor. Garret stood over me, his hand still trembling from the backhand he had just delivered across my face. “Have you lost your goddamn mind, Nora?” He leaned down, his voice dropping into a register meant only for my ears—a tone that sounded terrifyingly calm, but dripped with pure arsenic. “You will stand up right now and tell this room that you lied. You will apologize to Ivy for years of abuse. Or so help me…” His eyes darkened into bottomless pits. “Or I will have your mother’s remains removed from the National Memorial Cemetery. Today is her anniversary, isn’t it?” I looked up from the floor, my jaw trembling with disbelief. His jawline was still striking, his posture commanding, but there wasn’t a trace left of the boy who once held me in the rain. I glared up at him, my eyes burning with broken capillaries. “Try it.” Garret reached slowly into his dress jacket and pulled out a small, heavy plastic transmitter. “There are demolition charges set beneath the foundation of her memorial plot right now, Nora. Be a good girl. Don’t force my hand.” He called me by my name like a lover, but his voice sounded like a demon whispering from the dark. He had planned this. To shield Ivy from the consequences of a murder charge, he had laid siege to the only sacred ground I had left in this world. That plot was earned through my mother’s lifetime of civil service and military honors. It was the only reason I had kept breathing through five years of isolation. I swallowed the metallic taste of blood rising in my throat. Slowly, I pushed myself up from the hardwood, turned toward Ivy, and sank down onto my knees. “Ivy Miller,” I whispered, every syllable feeling like broken glass. “My mother and I were wrong. I am… deeply… sorry.” I lifted my chin. Ivy’s tear-stained face was already curving into a victorious, triumphant sneer. I turned my eyes back to Garret. “Are you satisfied, Colonel?” Garret’s chest rose and fell sharply. He swallowed hard, adjusting his tie to hide his unease. “Good,” he muttered, his voice strained. “You know your place. Now go. Lay some flowers at her stone for me while you’re at it.” Having delivered his performance for the crowd, he wrapped his arm firmly around Ivy’s waist and turned back toward the buffet, rejoining the celebration. Laughter and clinking champagne flutes resumed behind me, along with the vicious murmurs of the guests. “No wonder he never touched her. A soul that twisted… those leaked bedroom photos were probably a cry for help from some poor enlisted boy she trapped.” “Stole her sister’s fiancé, tried to play the victim… disgusting.” I pushed myself up from the cold floor, completely numb to the noise. The vows, the promises, the heroic young officer who swore to protect me—it was all a grotesque farce. Just as I reached the heavy double doors of the banquet hall, a sharp, electronic chirp caught my ear. A few yards away, sheltered behind a floral arch where no one else was looking, Ivy gave me a bright, vicious smile. In her manicured hand, she held a secondary transmitter. The small red LED display was already counting down. 00:45… 00:44… Every hair on my arms stood on end. I broke into a dead sprint, bursting through the double doors and crashing into the rainy night outside. Behind me, Garret caught the sudden flurry of movement and half-turned to call out my name, but Ivy’s fingers caught his lapel. “Garret, honey, come toast with the General’s family…” He hesitated, forced a thin smile, and let himself be pulled away. At the National Memorial Cemetery, the rain turned the manicured lawn into a slick morass of mud. I dropped to my knees before my mother’s polished marble headstone, using my bare hands to tear through the sod, weeping, scraping frantically at the wet earth until my fingernails cracked and blood coated my knuckles. “Mom… Mom, get up, please…” A deafening roar ripped through the silence of the valley. The shockwave knocked me backward into the mud. Granite shattered into thousands of jagged shards, slicing through the air like shrapnel. The heavy concrete vault ruptured, and the silver urn containing her ashes burst open into the storm. A cloud of pale, sacred dust swirled into the rain, scattered across the churned mud in seconds. With it went the last living piece of my heart. Before the heatwave from the blast could dissipate, a shower of heavy debris struck the side of my skull. The world went violently, blessedly black. Back at the banquet, Garret Mercer never stayed to cut the birthday cake. Unease had gnawed through his gut until he could no longer stand the sound of Ivy’s voice. Excusing himself abruptly, he bought a bouquet of white lilies at a late-night florist and drove through the downpour toward the cemetery gates. He told himself he just wanted to make sure Nora had laid the flowers. He wanted to make sure she was safe. But the moment his headlights washed over the family plot, his pupils contracted into pinpricks.

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1 In the fifth year of my marriage to Harrison, I told his parents I wanted a divorce. Eleanor, my mother-in-law, went pale, her fine porcelain teacup trembling against its saucer. “Darling, Harrison carries the weight of the entire firm on his shoulders right now. You’re exhausted. You’re letting the pressure get the better of you.” Arthur, Harrison’s father, leaned back against the deep mahogany armchair, his tone smooth, practiced, patriarchal. “A marriage isn’t a straight line, Nora. It requires endurance. You weather the rough seasons, you give each other grace.” I looked at the two of them—seated under the gilded chandelier of their lakefront home, sheltered by generational wealth and the comforting fiction that their only son was a paragon of virtue. A sudden, quiet laugh broke from my throat. It tasted like ash. “Let’s play a game,” I said, leaning over the low coffee table. Arthur frowned slightly. “A game?” “I’m going to call him right now,” I said, laying my phone face-up between our saucers. “I’ll ask him to wire me fifteen hundred dollars. If he sends it, we forget this conversation ever happened. I will stay, I will try, and I won’t utter the word divorce again.” Arthur exchanged an amused, slightly patronizing look with his wife, then nodded. “Done.” To him, fifteen hundred dollars was pocket change—a rounding error on Harrison’s corporate card. The request seemed childish to them, an insecure young wife testing her husband’s devotion over petty cash. I took a slow breath, looking into their calm, expectant faces. “On one condition. Whatever happens, whatever you hear, do not make a sound.” They both gave slight, solemn nods. I tapped the screen, dialed Harrison’s direct line, and switched on the speakerphone. The ringtone chimed three times before the line clicked open. “Yeah? Nora, what is it?” Harrison’s voice was crisp, background noise humming with the low chatter of a boutique restaurant or an upscale lounge. I kept my voice completely neutral. “I need to talk to you.” A pause lingered on the line. When Harrison spoke again, his voice dropped an octave, tightened with an instinctive, ugly vigilance. “Are you alone? Are my parents there?” “No,” I lied smoothly. “Just me.” The shift in his demeanor was instantaneous, like grease catching fire. The guarded chill evaporated into raw, venomous impatience. “Then make it fast. I’m busy.” Arthur’s relaxed posture vanished. He sat bolt upright, his eyebrows knitting together. Eleanor stared at the glowing rectangle on the table as if it were a foreign, venomous insect. In thirty-two years, they had never once heard their son speak with that kind of contempt. “I need you to send me fifteen hundred dollars,” I said evenly. “What the hell do you need that kind of money for—” Before he could finish his reflexive interrogation, another voice slipped through the receiver. Young, bright, dripping with performative innocence: “Harrison, sweetie, if she’s running low, why doesn’t she just get a job? You work so hard to carry everything already.” Mackenzie. The bright-eyed college junior from the disadvantaged-youth initiative Harrison had supposedly taken under his wing as an act of noble corporate charity. Shatter. The crystal glass slipped from Eleanor’s hand, fracturing across the hardwood floor into a dozen bright, jagged shards. Harrison’s snarl exploded through the tiny speaker. “What the hell was that? Are you smashing plates again just to get my attention? God, you are pathetic. Do you ever stop?” Eleanor gasped, instinctively bending to clean up the mess, but Arthur’s hand shot out, gripping her wrist like a vice. His face had gone from confusion to a deep, suffused purple, his chest heaving behind his tailored sweater. I didn’t blink. I kept my eyes on the carpet and spoke into the phone. “Your parents are coming over for Christmas Eve dinner in an hour. Send me the money so I can finish setting things up.” “Here we go again,” he sneered. “A couple hundred bucks from the grocery account isn’t enough? What are you buying, gold-leaf napkins?” “Not enough,” I said, my tone flat, immovable. “Today, it has to be fifteen hundred.” “Have you completely lost your mind? Who the hell do you think you are? You live under my roof, you eat my food, you haven’t contributed a single dime in five years, and you can’t even give this family a child. You’re completely useless!” A suffocating, dead silence dropped over the living room. Arthur’s knuckles went white where he gripped his wife’s hand. Eleanor’s lips were trembling violently, both hands flying to her mouth to smother a sob. And me? The fragile, brittle veneer of composure I had worn for months finally cracked down the center. A hot, silent tear spilled over my lashes, dropping straight onto the illuminated screen. Even when you believe your heart is already dead, the blunt force of the cruelty can still break through the numbness. I swallowed past the sharp ache in my throat and asked, my voice barely above a whisper: “Harrison… do you even remember the night we met?” 2 “Why would anyone care about that ancient history?” Mackenzie’s voice chimed in again, smug and syrupy, dripping with the petty triumph of a mistress who believed she held all the cards. “Besides, my first time was with Harrison. He already promised he’s going to marry me anyway.” Arthur surged out of his chair, a raw groan tearing from Eleanor’s throat. I looked up with burning, bloodshot eyes, lifting a hand to shake my head at them with what little strength I had left. Don’t. Stay quiet. Let me finish. I dragged my sleeve across my wet cheeks. Beside me, Eleanor’s trembling fingers pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbing at my jaw with a touch so impossibly gentle it nearly undid me completely. Five years ago, on a sub-zero December night, I was walking home after finishing an exhausting double shift at the diner near the university campus. Harrison’s sedan was pulled over on the icy shoulder, hazard lights blinking uselessly into the swirling snow, hood propped open. He was pacing in the sleet, frantic, muttering that he had an acquisition contract that had to be hand-delivered across town within thirty minutes. My late father had run an auto-body shop; I grew up with grease under my fingernails. I walked over, diagnosed the loose alternator belt, tightened it with a wrench from his trunk kit, and got the engine roaring again. He took my number right there on the frozen asphalt, typing my name into his contacts as Snow Angel Mechanic. A few hours later, he called. His voice had been giddy, breathless, laced with nervous adoration. “I made the meeting. We closed the deal… Can I take you out? Please?” At that tiny Italian bistro, I had been so intimidated by his linen shirts and prep-school polish that I barely dared look up from my bread plate. But he had been endlessly gentle, drawing me out, laughing at my dry jokes, never letting a single awkward silence settle. When he walked me to my apartment door in the freezing wind, he unwound his soft cashmere scarf and wrapped it around my neck, tucking my hair behind my ear. The calls became daily. Then came the golden afternoon in the park, when he showed up with an armful of white daisies, his hands shaking so hard he could barely hold the stems. “I want to wake up next to you for every ordinary, boring day for the rest of my life. Will you marry me, Nora?” When he brought me home to meet Arthur and Eleanor, I had been terrified, clutching my purse, confessing in a small voice that I had grown up in foster care, that I had no family to bring to the table. Harrison had interlaced his fingers with mine, looked his wealthy, traditional parents straight in the eye, and swore: “I will spend my whole life cherishing her. Our family is her family now.” In that moment, I truly believed the cold, wandering part of my life was over. I thought I had finally come home. “Oh, wrap it up, Nora!” Harrison snapped through the phone, pure irritation bleeding into the line. “What is this, a soap opera monologue? Nobody cares about some college-era nostalgia. It’s over. It’s dead!” Mackenzie let out an airy, derisive giggle in the background. My tears dried up. The well was empty. Eleanor sat beside me, clutching a fistful of soaked tissues, her chest hitching silently. “Yeah,” I said, staring up at the plaster crown molding above, as if I could still see the snow falling through the headlights from five years ago. “It’s over. I was foolish enough to believe we’d stay that way.” My voice dropped into a steady, flat cadence. “Then came our second year. When I didn’t get pregnant right away, you decided the defect had to be mine. Soon after that, you started sponsoring your ‘underprivileged students.’ You stopped coming home for dinner. Then you stopped coming home at all.” Across the table, Arthur and Eleanor froze, the color draining from their faces until they looked like marble statues. For the first time, the full timeline slammed into them: this wasn’t a sudden rough patch. This was a slow, deliberate erosion that had been rotting their son from the inside out for years. 3 A bitter little smile pulled at the corner of my mouth. “Do you know, Harrison, the exact moment I realized we were never going to make it? It wasn’t a scream. It was something tiny.” On the other end of the line, Harrison’s patience was fraying thin. I could hear the faint, rhythmic tap of his fingernails against the table. Before he could hang up, I spoke with total clarity. “Let me finish what I have to say, Harrison. And the moment I hang up this phone, I will sign whatever papers you put in front of me. We’ll be done.” The tapping stopped. The prospect of an easy, unresisted exit appealed to him. “Fine. Go on.” “It was our third anniversary,” I said quietly. “I made beef bourguignon. I set the table with the good silver. I waited from six in the evening until one in the morning, reheating the pot three separate times. When you finally turned the key in the lock, you reeked of bourbon.” He had seen me sitting there in the dark, and his face hadn’t softened with guilt; his brow had twisted into an ugly scowl. “You looked at me like I was an intruder,” I continued. “You barked, ‘What are you doing sitting in the dark like a ghost?’ I told you it was our anniversary. You didn’t apologize. You didn’t even flinch. You just rolled your eyes and said, ‘Jesus, Nora, you stayed up until one in the morning for that? Are you out of your mind?’” I paused, remembering the heavy thud of his Italian leather briefcase dropping onto the floor. “You took off your coat, tossed it onto the armchair, and didn’t even notice that the silk collar had folded back. There was a bright, fresh smear of magenta lipstick on the crisp white fabric of your dress shirt. And do you remember what you said to me right after?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “You said: ‘I work seventy hours a week, I don’t have time for this hallmark garbage. Besides, it was Mackenzie’s twenty-first birthday tonight. The kids from the foundation dragged me out to celebrate and wouldn’t let me leave. My head is splitting, so do me a favor and stop suffocating me.’” Beside me, Eleanor couldn’t hold it back anymore; a choked, broken sob slipped through her fingers. Through the speaker, there was only Mackenzie’s bored, theatrical sigh, and Harrison murmuring softly to her, “Hold on a second, babe, she’s almost done.”

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1 The day I was brought back to the Carmichael estate, I realized I had been dropped into a family of doomed villains. My older brother was a ruthless, cold-hearted workaholic destined to become dangerously obsessed with a girl he couldn’t have. My younger sister was the textbook mean-girl sidekick, slated for a tragic, humiliating end. And our parents? They were the oblivious collateral damage, destined to bankrupt the family by crossing the wrong Old Money heir. Honestly, it was a lot to process. But I had finally crawled my way out of rural poverty into a life of Egyptian cotton and central heating. There was absolutely no way I was going to let this gilded ship sink. To save this family, I was going to have to fix them. Walking into the Carmichael mansion in Connecticut, I had deliberately worn my nicest dress—a blue floral sundress I’d ironed twice that morning. The moment I stepped into the foyer, the girl on the velvet sofa—dressed in a pristine white tulle skirt, looking like a porcelain doll—pinched her nose. “What is that… smell on her?” This was the fake daughter. Serena Carmichael. I lifted my arm and took a whiff. “It’s not that bad, is it? Just a little topsoil and engine grease. I was fixing the tractor before the lawyer picked me up. If it bothers you, I can go scrub down now.” Serena’s eyes instantly brimmed with tears. Her voice trembled. “Mom, is she… is she mad at me? Does she hate me for taking her place all these years?” The elegant woman standing nearby—Eleanor, my biological mother—frowned immediately. “Harper, your sister was just making an observation. There is no need for that attitude.” A young man sitting in the leather armchair, typing furiously on a MacBook, snapped his laptop shut. He leveled a glacial glare at me. “Serena, come here.” Serena rushed over, burying her face in his cashmere shoulder, her shoulders shaking with delicate sobs. He patted her back, his eyes cutting into me like shattered glass. “Let’s get one thing straight. In this house, if you ever make her cry again, you will answer to me. I am Preston Carmichael. And I only recognize Serena as my sister.” I scratched the back of my neck, utterly bewildered. What did I even say? The butler escorted me to the second floor, pushing open double mahogany doors to reveal a bedroom larger than my entire farmhouse back in Montana. Downstairs, Serena was still weeping softly. “Preston, it’s not fair to put Harper in the guest wing. I should pack up my room and give it to her…” She didn’t finish her sentence, because at that exact moment, I dropped my canvas duffel bag and launched myself face-first onto the mattress. “Holy hell! Is this memory foam? Are these goose-down pillows?!” I rolled across the massive bed, sinking into the plush duvet, practically screaming with joy. “This is absolute heaven. I’m going to sleep until I forget what my own name is!” Downstairs, the crying abruptly stopped. 2 By dinnertime, my mood had only improved. Rich people really knew how to live. A casual Tuesday dinner looked like a Thanksgiving feast. At the long mahogany table, Richard, Eleanor, and Preston were all busy peeling shrimp and cutting the prime rib for Serena, making sure her plate was perfect. I didn’t care about the optics. I grabbed the bowl of garlic mashed potatoes, scooped a mountain onto my plate, grabbed three rolls, and absolutely inhaled my food. When I set down my water glass, a long, rumbling burp slipped out of me. All three of them froze, their silverware suspended in mid-air as they stared at me in horror. I quickly slapped a hand over my mouth. “My bad. I forgot. Do people on the East Coast not do the digestion burp?” Serena, whose eyes were still a little puffy from her afternoon crying session, stared at me blankly. “Mom, Dad, and Preston have been doting on me all night. Aren’t you angry? Aren’t you jealous?” “Jealous of what?” I patted my comfortably full stomach, grinning so wide my cheeks ached. “I’m full, it’s warm in here, and the food is incredible. Why would I be mad?” I pushed my chair back. “If there are no chores to do, I’m gonna head up to bed.” The three of them nodded mechanically, too stunned to speak. I happily jogged up the stairs, threw myself onto my cloud of a bed, and fell asleep in seconds. That night, I had a vivid, terrifying dream. It was a revelation, really. It showed me that the world I was living in was the exact plot of one of those dramatic, trope-heavy romance novels. Serena was the spiteful, jealous secondary character harboring a toxic crush on the male lead. My parents, blinded by their love for her, would eventually offend the male lead and drive the Carmichael family into utter bankruptcy. Preston would develop a dark, pathological obsession with the female lead, pulling dirty tricks to ruin the male lead, only to end up rotting in federal prison. And me? After the Carmichaels lost everything, I’d be shipped right back to the dirt-poor farm in Montana. Absolutely not. I woke up in a cold sweat. I had just gotten my hands on this luxury, and nobody—not my dramatic new family, and certainly not some fictional plotline—was going to rip it away from me. 3 To protect my newfound wealth, I drafted a comprehensive rescue plan. Step one: Sever Serena’s toxic crush on the male lead, preventing her from ever triggering the female lead’s wrath. Shortly after my arrival, the family enrolled me in Serena’s elite private school, St. Jude’s Academy. On my first morning, I stepped out the front door just as Preston’s Range Rover was pulling out of the driveway. I sprinted across the gravel, cutting right in front of the hood. “Hey, hold your horses! I’m not in yet!” Preston rolled down the window, his jaw clenched. “I told you. I only have one sister.” “Don’t worry, I won’t call you my brother,” I said, looking perfectly reasonable. “Where I’m from, calling a guy ‘brother’ when you aren’t related usually means he’s either in a cult or a motorcycle gang…” “It’s fine, Preston,” Serena murmured from the passenger seat, tugging at his sleeve. “She just got here from the country. It’s natural she wants to ride with us.” And just like that, I was in the backseat. I unzipped my backpack and pulled out a foil-wrapped, greasy sausage and pepper hero I’d scored from the estate’s groundskeeper. I took a massive bite. Instantly, the heavy, pungent smell of fried onions and meat filled the leather interior. Preston slammed on the brakes, turning around to glare at me, his voice shaking. “What in God’s name are you eating?!” “Hector’s secret recipe. It’s a masterpiece.” I generously tore off a piece and held it out. “You want some? I share.” Normally, billionaire heirs didn’t eat breakfast like this. But since the kitchen staff kept conveniently “forgetting” to prepare a plate for me, I’d befriended Hector the groundskeeper. “I’m telling you, it’s incredible. You want a bite, Preston?” His face darkened like a thundercloud. “Have you no manners? Who gave you permission to use my first name?” I blinked, eyes wide. “You just told me not to call you brother!” “…From now on, I permit it.” “Awesome.” I chewed happily. “So, you want a bite of the sandwich, brother?” “EAT IT YOURSELF!” Preston rolled down all four windows to air out the car. Beside him, Serena began to dab at her eyes. “Oh my god… Preston isn’t just my brother anymore…” Preston pressed his lips into a thin line, ignoring her tears, and slammed his foot on the gas. I leaned forward and patted her shoulder. “Hey, look on the bright side. Now you have a sister, too.” Serena cried even harder. 4 When we arrived at St. Jude’s, Preston dumped us at the curb and immediately drove off to get his car detailed. I followed a red-eyed Serena into our first-period classroom. Within ten minutes, I was completely lost. This elite prep school taught its honors literature class entirely in French. I poked Serena’s arm. “Where the hell are we? Did we cross a border? Why is she speaking cursive?” “You don’t understand it?” Serena batted her eyelashes, looking the picture of innocence. “I heard you had perfect grades at your public school. How can you not understand basic conversational French?” “Honey, you gotta understand. My French teacher in Montana was the JV wrestling coach. Our curriculum was entirely silent.” I sighed, grabbing her hand. “Be a pal and translate for me?” Serena almost smiled, but then she looked down at my hand and recoiled. “Did you wash your hands after eating that greasy onion sandwich?!” “Didn’t have time, but I wiped them on a napkin…” Serena yanked her hand away, shrieking, “Harper!” The teacher, furious at the disruption, kicked us both out into the hallway. I leaned against the lockers, sighing. “She’s yelling at us in English, but she teaches in French. What is the point of that?” Serena crossed her arms, refusing to look at me. I mentally reviewed the novel’s plotline. “Hey, doesn’t Tristan have a lacrosse game today?” Serena’s head snapped toward me, her face pale. “You know about Tristan Kensington? I knew it. You did your research.” She let out a cold laugh. “Don’t tell me you think the golden boy of New York’s oldest money is going to look twice at a dirt-poor farm girl like you?” I nodded solemnly. “You never know.” After all, in the original book, the female lead was a working-class girl, and Tristan fell so madly in love with her that he destroyed our entire family. “Delusional,” Serena spat. “The game isn’t over till it’s over,” I reasoned. “Don’t be too confident.” “You are impossible to talk to.” “Hey, maybe the Kensington heir just likes a girl with calluses.” “Talking to you is like playing the harp to a cow.” “And you’re a peach,” I replied cheerfully. She looked like she was going to spontaneously combust. 5 Tristan Kensington was the sole heir to the Kensington empire, the undisputed king of St. Jude’s. The bleachers by the lacrosse field were packed with girls holding up signs for him. At some point, Serena had slipped away and changed into her pristine cheerleader uniform, blending into the crowd near the front. Every time Tristan scored, she jumped up, cheering loudly. But after a few jumps, Serena’s face suddenly drained of color. The people around her began to whisper, pointing. On the field, distracted by the commotion, Tristan missed a pass. A player from the opposing team shoulder-checked him, taunting him. Furious, Tristan ripped off his helmet and glared at the sidelines, his eyes locking onto Serena. “Who told you to come down here?” Serena was ghostly pale, forcing a trembling smile. “Tristan, I just wanted to cheer for you…” I shoved my way through the crowd. Instantly, I saw it: a bright red stain blooming on the back of Serena’s white skirt. Tristan saw it too. He stepped back, his face twisting in visceral disgust. “Gross. Get her out of here.” A hot spike of anger shot through me. I didn’t care if he was the male lead of this universe. “Do you know how to speak to human beings?” I yelled, stepping in front of Serena. “You think a girl’s period is gross? Newsflash, Kensington, if it wasn’t for this ‘gross’ biology, you wouldn’t even exist. You’d still be a floating atom.” Tristan sneered. “She’s ruining my focus.” “Your focus sucks because you play like garbage. Don’t blame gravity just because you can’t catch a ball.” I reached down, scooped up a stray lacrosse ball, and without even using a stick, chucked it across the field with my bare hand. It sailed in a perfect, aggressive arc and smashed directly into the center of the practice net. I whistled sharply, raising an eyebrow at him. “See? Just takes a little elbow grease.” Tristan’s face turned an ugly shade of puce. Serena was staring at me, dumbfounded. I stripped off my uniform jacket, tied it tightly around her waist, and scooped her up bridal style. I didn’t wait for a reaction; I just carried her straight off the field, heading for the nurse’s office. The novel mentioned that Serena suffered from debilitating cramps. Once we got to the clinic, I poured her a cup of hot water and handed her a painkiller from the nurse. “Take this and go to sleep.” Serena silently swallowed the pill and pulled the thin blanket up to her chin. I waved. “Rest up. I gotta go back to class.” Just as I reached the door, Serena’s voice stopped me. “Harper.” I popped my head back in. “What’s up? Need more water?” She looked at me, a storm of complicated emotions in her eyes, and slowly shook her head. 6 When school let out, Preston was waiting in the Range Rover. As I walked up, my heart stopped. I saw him staring down at a tangerine in his hand, his eyes uncharacteristically soft and distant. Oh, no. In the plot, the female lead got lost on campus, stopped Preston’s car for directions, and gave him a tangerine as thanks. That piece of fruit was the catalyst. He became pathologically obsessed with her, treating that tangerine like a holy relic until the day he died. I immediately slapped a hand over my mouth, leaning heavily against the car door, groaning. “Brother… I feel so carsick. I think I’m gonna throw up. I just need something tart to settle my stomach…” Preston, a massive germaphobe, looked at me in sheer terror, terrified I was going to vomit on his leather seats. Without a second thought, he shoved the tangerine into my hands. “Eat this! Hurry!” I didn’t hesitate. I peeled it in one motion and shoved the female lead’s token of destiny into my mouth, swallowing it in three aggressive bites. Delicious. But to make sure he didn’t have any idle time to sit around pining over whoever gave it to him, I knocked on his bedroom door later that night, clutching my French textbook. “Brother, the school teaches entirely in French and I am dying. Tutor me?” Preston looked supremely annoyed, but he let me in. His bedroom was freezing and sterile, like a model home in a modern art museum. I sat at his desk, opened the book, and started reading aloud. “Mercy bow-coop.” “A-ban-don-er.” Preston’s face turned the color of ash. The fingers gripping the edge of his desk trembled. “Who taught you to pronounce it like that?” “Coach Miller. He said phonetic spelling builds character.” I scratched my head sheepishly. “Brother, do you think I just lack the gene for romance languages?” Preston took a deep, shuddering breath. His Type-A perfectionism took over. For the next three hours, he forced me to drill phonetics, aggressively correcting my tongue placement. By the time I stood up to leave, his eyes were glazed over in exhaustion. I tested the waters. “Hey, brother. Do you remember that tangerine from today?” “It’s a mandarine! Watch your nasal vowels!” he roared. I threw up a peace sign. “Got it! Bon sewer, brother!” I sprinted to the door and glanced back. Preston was standing in the middle of his room, teeth gritted. “It’s Bonsoir! Harper, get back here and repeat it ten times!” 7 The next morning, there was finally a breakfast plate set for me at the dining table. I had just taken a bite of my smoked salmon bagel when Eleanor asked, her tone dripping with passive-aggression, “Is it to your liking? Or do you prefer the groundskeeper’s greasy sandwiches?” “It’s okay. A little dry compared to Hector’s, to be honest.” I took a sip of orange juice. “Oh, Mom, you know about Hector’s sandwiches? Next time I’ll ask him to make an extra one for you. You’ll love it.” Eleanor dropped her silver spoon, the clatter echoing in the quiet room. “You call the gardener by his first name and treat him like family, but you talk to me as if we’re strangers at a diner. Do you think I’m on the same level as the hired help?” “No, of course not. You’re my biological mother.” I looked at her with wide, innocent eyes. “But didn’t you tell me on my first day to keep my distance so Serena wouldn’t feel threatened?” She choked on her words, and immediately, tears welled in her eyes. Beside her, Serena’s eyes grew shiny too. “Harper, I didn’t mean for you to feel…” One sentence, and I had silenced them both. Just then, Preston trudged down the stairs. He had massive, purple bags under his eyes. He walked over to me and dropped a three-inch-thick binder onto the table with a heavy thud. “You have two weeks to memorize these conjugations. I will be testing you personally.” I opened it. It was hundreds of pages of French grammar basics, meticulously annotated in his sharp handwriting. I stared at him in awe. “Brother, did you sleep at all last night?” He let out a dark, hollow laugh. “After hearing your accent, who could possibly sleep?” 8 That weekend, the Carmichaels hosted a lavish gala. Tristan Kensington was on the guest list. Eleanor pulled me aside early. “You embarrassed the Kensington boy at school. Tonight, I expect you to seek him out and formally apologize.” “Understood, Mom,” I said with a nod. Per her strict instructions, I had dropped the casual country talk. Serena walked up and linked her arm through mine. “Harper, you don’t have a gown yet, do you? It’s too late to get one tailored. Come to my room and pick one of mine.” She smiled sweetly. “I have a whole closet full of them.” I felt a pang of genuine warmth. “Serena, that’s actually really nice of you.” How could a sister this sweet be the villain? I wondered. Serena looked at me, her expression flickering with something unreadable, but she stayed quiet. In her massive walk-in closet, I bypassed the glittering ballgowns and picked the simplest, most understated black dress. “I’ll take this one. I’ll run it through the wash before I give it back.” Serena fell silent for a moment. “Harper, couture cannot be put in a washing machine.” “Really? Learn something new every day.” I realized the logistics were too complicated. “Never mind, I’ll just wear something of mine.” Serena’s jaw tightened. She looked like she was grinding her teeth. “It’s fine. Keep the dress. I’m gifting it to you.” I suddenly remembered the plot. At tonight’s gala, Serena was supposed to pull a stunt to humiliate the female lead, only for Tristan to publicly destroy her for it. And tonight was the night Preston, triggered by the memory of the tangerine, would fully spiral into his obsession with the female lead. Looking at Serena now, I noticed she seemed deeply distracted. As we walked out of her room and approached the top of the grand marble staircase, she suddenly unhooked her arm from mine. With a deliberate, dramatic motion, she threw her weight backward, falling toward the steep drop. “Harper, why would you push me—!” 9 In that fraction of a second, the entire gala fell dead silent. Every eye in the grand foyer snapped up to the staircase. Serena was leaning backward, her face a mask of beautiful, tragic despair, perfectly poised to tumble down twenty marble steps and crack her skull open. According to the original plot, this fall would give Serena a mild concussion. I would be blamed, branded a monster by New York society, and exiled from the family. But I had spent my entire life wrestling runaway hogs and fixing heavy machinery in the mud. My reflexes were not normal. I dropped my center of gravity, lunged forward, and grabbed Serena by the ankle. “Get back up here!” The momentum was fierce. We both slid down two steps. But my footing held. With one arm, I hoisted her entirely off the ground, suspending her upside down in mid-air. Serena’s tragic, beautiful expression instantly vanished. She was dangling by one leg, her layers of expensive tulle and silk falling downward, completely enveloping her head like a collapsed parachute. “Ahhhh—!!!” Her muffled shriek echoed through the cavernous foyer. I calmly adjusted my grip, hauled her upright like I was lifting a sack of feed, and casually smoothed down her skirt. At the bottom of the stairs, the elite guests stood with their jaws unhinged. Tristan, who had just rushed to the foot of the stairs with his arms outstretched to catch her, froze mid-lunge, looking utterly ridiculous.

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After a blistering screaming match with my lifelong nemesis, I got knocked out cold by falling debris. When I came to, I figured I’d play dumb, fake amnesia, and extort him for everything he was worth. “Who are you?” I whispered, blinking up at him with Bambi eyes. He froze. The shock on his face was palpable, but without missing a beat, he lied straight through his teeth: “I’m your fiancé. We’ve been together for eight years.” I stared at him. Excuse me??? He leaned in, his voice dropping an octave. “Want to make out? Just to, you know, jog your memory with the taste.” Men. Absolute dogs. I was after his bank account; this bastard was after my mouth. 1 Nolan Davis and I practically grew up in each other’s backyards. By the time we were seventeen, we were sworn enemies. Honestly, if you looked at us on paper—two kids from old-money families, both ridiculously competitive, both easy on the eyes—you’d think we were a match made in country-club heaven. But in reality, we were like oil and water. A spark and a powder keg. Case in point: this morning, he ruthlessly poached a massive contract my firm was trying to land with Reed Global. I had marched straight into his corner office, slamming my hands on his mahogany desk. “Does it taste better when you steal the food right out of my mouth? God, Nolan, you are the absolute worst.” Nolan just sat there, his impossibly long legs crossed, muttering something under his breath that I couldn’t quite catch. Right then, my phone buzzed on speaker. My assistant informed me that Declan Reed’s flight had just landed in the city. If I wanted to salvage this deal, I had to corner Declan immediately. Besides, Declan and I went way back. We were high school classmates. We had history. Hearing that, Nolan practically shot out of his leather chair. “You are not going to see him. Harper, stay here. I need to talk to you.” I was too pissed to care about whatever corporate mansplaining he had queued up. “Watch me!” I snapped. “Who the hell do you think you are? You don’t own me!” I stormed out of the Davis Holdings building. Outside, the sky was an angry, bruised purple. A nor’easter was rolling in, and the wind was howling through the concrete canyons of the city. I tilted my head back to check the dark clouds, and that was the exact moment a heavy terracotta planter, trailing a massive ivy plant, blew right off a second-floor balcony and introduced itself to my skull. Right before the lights went out, I saw Nolan sprinting out of the revolving doors, his face pale and twisted in sheer panic. That son of a bitch, I thought, slipping into darkness. He’s probably rushing over to check if I’m dead so he can monopolize the rest of my clients. Ruthless. When my consciousness finally clawed its way back, the sharp, sterile scent of rubbing alcohol flooded my senses. A doctor’s muffled voice filtered into the room. “Ms. Hayes is perfectly fine. She has a mild concussion, so she might experience some dizziness or nausea over the next few days. Just standard post-concussion protocol.” “Then why isn’t she waking up? Are you sure there’s no brain damage?” Nolan’s voice was ragged, laced with a desperation I had never heard before. The doctor paused. “Uh… Mr. Davis, she’s just taking a nap.” Me, pretending to still be unconscious: … Wait, so I got knocked out for exactly one second and then just took a cozy little nap? My brain started working in overdrive. Opportunity. If I was going to suffer the indignity of a concussion, I was going to make Nolan pay for it. Literally. I’d fake amnesia, move into his penthouse, and drain his resources to make up for the Reed Global deal he stole. It wasn’t a terrible plan. Even though we hated each other, our parents were inseparable. Right now, the four of them were on a luxury cruise in the Mediterranean. And frankly, the corporate catering at my office was getting stale, while Maria, Nolan’s private chef and housekeeper, made a truffle risotto that could bring a tear to your eye. Thinking about that risotto, my eyelids fluttered involuntarily. A nurse gasped. “Mr. Davis, she’s waking up!” Damn it, I need a minute to get into character! Channel your inner Meryl Streep, Harper! I fluttered my eyes open, softening my gaze until I looked as vacant and innocent as a newborn fawn. Nolan rushed to my bedside, waving two shaking fingers in front of my face. “Harper, how many fingers am I holding up?” His hand was trembling so much it was just a blurry appendage. I weakly raised a hand to my bandaged temple, putting on my most delicate, breathy voice. “I don’t know… but… who are you?” Nolan froze. He whipped around to glare at the doctor. “You said she was fine! Why the hell doesn’t she remember anything?” The doctor began to sweat, nervously clicking his pen. “This shouldn’t be happening. Medically speaking, this doesn’t make sense…” He cleared his throat. “It appears the patient is experiencing transient global amnesia. But don’t worry, it should resolve itself.” I offered the doctor a sweet, vacant smile, then turned back to Nolan. To really nail the coffin shut on this performance, I tilted my head and asked again, “Who are you?” I swear, my acting in that moment was Oscar-worthy. The sheer vulnerability, the confusion. It was flawless. Nolan swallowed hard. He hesitated for a fraction of a second before saying, “I’m your fiancé. We’ve been together for eight years, Harper. We’re getting married soon.” Me: ??? Was he onto me? Was he counter-playing my amnesia grift? But before I could overthink it, Nolan’s large, warm hand cupped the side of my face. His thumb gently stroked my cheekbone. “It’s okay, Harp,” he murmured softly. “I’m going to take you home.” Holy shit. Either I had actual brain damage, or Nolan had finally lost his mind. I stared at him in genuine shock and realized, with a sudden jolt, that the rims of his eyes were rimmed with red. His lashes were wet. It looked like he had been crying. Right. The wind from the nor’easter outside. It must have made his eyes water. Maybe my stare was a little too incredulous, because Nolan cleared his throat, a faint flush creeping up his neck. “What? You don’t believe me? Want to make out? Just to, you know, jog your memory with the taste.” Before I could even process the audacity of that sentence, Nolan turned his head away, the tips of his ears burning crimson. “Kidding. Just a joke,” he muttered to the floor. “There are people in the room.” I blinked. I didn’t see a joke in his eyes. Just seconds ago, his gaze had been fixed on my mouth with a dark, consuming intensity. He looked like he actually wanted to kiss me. Wait a minute. I was just here for his money. Was he trying to get in my pants? 2 Since I was “perfectly fine,” we checked out of the hospital quickly. As we walked down the corridor, I caught my reflection in the glass doors. Dear God. My hair was a rat’s nest, and there was literally a crushed ivy leaf plastered to my forehead. I looked like a swamp witch. Okay, Nolan definitely didn’t want to kiss me. He just wanted to get close enough to laugh at my misery. Classic. “Got your meds. Let’s go home, Harp.” Nolan jogged over to me, shrugging off his heavy wool trench coat and draping it over my shoulders. He flashed me a warm, genuine smile that made my chest do a weird, unprompted stutter. Damn it. That was the smile I used to be entirely in love with. When exactly did we turn into enemies? I let my mind drift back. It was junior year of high school. Nolan was seventeen; I was sixteen. It was the same year Declan Reed transferred to our prep school. Nolan had always been the golden boy. Sharp jawline, piercing eyes, effortlessly athletic, and fiercely intelligent—he never dropped below the top of the honor roll. He was the center of gravity at our school. And naturally, I was the one orbiting closest to him. Because of my late-summer birthday and skipping a grade, I was placed in his year. He carried my ridiculously heavy backpack. He did my share of the lab clean-ups. Even during P.E., when we had to run the dreaded mile, he’d finish his laps first and then fall back to jog beside me, keeping my pace. “If you get too tired, Harp, I’ll literally carry you home,” he’d tease, jogging backward effortlessly. “Come on, keep moving!” He was always coaxing me, always gentle. I had never seen him truly angry. Falling for him was the most natural thing in the world. Besides, half the school was in love with him anyway. We were inseparable. Until midterms. Right before exams, Declan Reed arrived. He was quiet, brilliant, and possessed the kind of brooding good looks that made girls whisper in the hallways. The administration treated him like royalty because, between Declan and Nolan, our school was guaranteed two Ivy League acceptances. Two days before the exams, Nolan got sick. Badly sick. Pneumonia. He lost weight, his skin was pale, and he spent study hall with his head buried in his arms on his desk, coughing weakly. My heart ached for him, but I knew better than to bother him when he felt like trash. I was sitting a few desks away, chewing on my pencil, staring blankly at AP Calculus. Declan happened to walk by, noticed my struggle, and leaned over, effortlessly solving the equation in two steps. I beamed at him and gave him a thumbs-up. He really was Nolan’s equal. Because I was the youngest in the grade, I still had a bit of baby fat in my cheeks. It was freezing in the library, and I was buried in this oversized, fluffy white sweater Nolan had bought for me. I probably looked like a lost sheep. Declan chuckled and affectionately ruffled my hair. “Not bad, kid.” I hadn’t noticed him reaching out, so I didn’t dodge it. But a second later, the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. I turned around to see Nolan. His head was off his arms. He was staring at us, his eyes narrowed into dark, icy slits. He looked like someone had just broken into his house and stolen his most prized possession. That afternoon, the sky opened up. A massive, torrential downpour hammered the city. When the final bell rang, Nolan didn’t wait for me. He walked straight out into the torrential rain. Because our families were high-profile, we always walked the few blocks home rather than waiting for obvious town cars, trying to keep a low profile. He just left me there. I stood under the school awning, stunned, until a large black umbrella appeared over my head. I looked up. It was Declan. “No umbrella? Come on, I’ll walk you back.” I watched Nolan’s silhouette disappear into the gray sheets of rain, a heavy knot forming in my stomach. What had I done wrong? Later that evening, long after I got home, I snuck up to the attic window that faced Nolan’s house. His bedroom light was off. He hadn’t come home yet. But he left so early, I thought. Where is he? I was just about to go downstairs and call his mom when I finally saw him walking up his driveway. He was soaked to the bone. Dripping wet. He looked exhausted, defeated, and utterly miserable. Usually, when he got to his room, he’d look across the yard to my window and wave. But that night, he walked in, didn’t even glance my way, and aggressively yanked his curtains shut. The next morning, Nolan was waiting on my porch as usual, but he didn’t say a single word. I tried to break the ice. “Nolan, yesterday…” “Declan walked you home,” he interrupted. It wasn’t a question. It was a cold, hard statement. As he said it, he reached out, grabbed my heavy backpack, and slung it over his shoulder, just like always. He was acting weird, but at least he was talking to me again. I felt a rush of relief. But just as I smiled at him, I looked up and saw Declan standing by the school gates, waving at us. Nolan looked at Declan, then looked down at my smiling face. His jaw clenched. “Does seeing him really make you that happy?” That was the day the fracture began. The rumors started pouring in. I heard Sloane Kensington—the reigning queen bee of the junior class—bragging that Nolan had given her his umbrella the day before. So that was why he walked home in the rain. To be chivalrous to Sloane. Then, I saw a braided leather lucky charm tied to Sloane’s designer tote. She loudly proclaimed it was a blessed talisman from a monastery upstate. Nolan had mysteriously taken a weekend trip upstate right before he got pneumonia. Later, rumors started flying that I was secretly dating Declan. When someone asked Nolan about it in the locker room, I happened to be walking by. I heard him say, with forced apathy, “Why would I care who she dates? She’s nothing to me.” The final nail in the coffin was graduation. Declan was moving to London for university. I was sitting on the quad, looking miserable—mostly because my relationship with Nolan had completely deteriorated into cold warfare. Nolan walked up to me, looked down with a sneer, and said, “Still crying over Declan leaving? Fine. Tell your dad I’m taking over the logistics account your family has been trying to close. Consider it gone.” From that day on, it was war. We spent the next eight years going at each other’s throats, both refusing to yield, finding sick satisfaction only when we could make the other person lose. 3 Lost in my memories, I realized Nolan had brought me to his place, not mine. Even though our family estates were literally next door to each other in the Hamptons. I leaned into the bit, grabbing his arm and looking around in exaggerated awe. “Wow, future hubby, is this your house? It’s beautiful.” I felt the muscles in Nolan’s arm instantly lock up. The afternoon light caught the edge of his ear—it was completely red. He slowly turned to face me, his expression strangely intense. “My name is Nolan. You used to call me Noly when we were little. Could you… could you just call me that once?” Me: Uh… I hadn’t called him that since we were ten. In my phone, his contact name was literally “Stubborn Jackass.” But hey, if he wanted to play house, I was going to make it unbearable for him. “Did I used to call you that?” I tapped my chin playfully. “I think it sounds a little childish. How about I just call you Babe? Or… Honey? Does that work, Honey?” I couldn’t beat him in the boardroom today, so I was going to psychologically torment him in his own home. Nolan stood completely frozen, a muscle feathering in his jaw. Ha! Scared you, didn’t I? But then, the corner of his mouth twitched upward into a devastatingly soft smile. He stepped into my space, leaned down, and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me flush against him. “Whatever you want, Sweetheart. You’re the boss.” Wait. What? His voice was a low rumble against my chest. I was so taken aback by the warmth of him that I completely forgot to push him away. I just let him hold my hand as he led me into the massive, echoing house. The place was dead quiet. Maria was apparently off for the week. No truffle risotto for me. A catastrophic miscalculation. Instead, Nolan rolled up the sleeves of his cashmere sweater and started boiling pasta in his state-of-the-art kitchen. “Honey, I’m making carbonara, is that okay?” “Babe, do you want extra parmesan?” How was he saying these pet names so smoothly? Was this a long-con humiliation tactic? “Babe, if you’re hungry, there’s chocolate on the top shelf of the fridge to hold you over,” he called out. I opened the Sub-Zero fridge. The entire top shelf was lined with artisanal hazelnut chocolate bars. My absolute favorite. When we were kids, my parents were strict about sugar. I used to beg Nolan for candy, and he always magically produced it. Wow, I thought. No wonder he always had chocolate on him. He must be obsessed with it. I snapped off a piece of chocolate, leaning against the marble island, watching him cook. He was even better looking now than he was in high school. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. Even wearing an apron, he looked like he belonged in a GQ spread. The chocolate tasted suddenly a little bitter on my tongue. I couldn’t stop picturing the teenage boy who used to sneak me candy in the library. He plated the pasta, sliding a massive bowl toward me. He had taken the time to perfectly fry an egg on top. His own plate was just the leftovers from the pan. If I really had amnesia, this would be incredibly romantic. As it was, I just assumed he hadn’t poisoned my food. The portion was huge. I couldn’t finish it. Without a word, Nolan pulled my half-eaten bowl across the island and finished it himself. Okay. Definitely not poisoned. Later that night, the tension thickened. Nolan stood in the doorway of his own master bedroom, looking entirely out of his depth. Why is he nervous? I thought. It’s his bedroom. We’ve known each other since we were in diapers. “You take the bed,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’ll sleep in the guest room next door. Call me if you need anything.” I narrowed my eyes. He’s trying to ditch me so he can finalize the Reed Global contract. I had overheard him on the phone while he was cooking, telling his VP he was going to video-conference Declan tonight to sign the papers. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I reached out and lightly tugged the hem of his sweater. “Nolan… we’ve been together for eight years. Are you saying we don’t sleep in the same bed?” I let my gaze drop slowly, deliberately down his torso. “Unless… is there a problem? Are you… you know, incapable?” Nolan’s jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth might shatter. The look of pure, restrained agony on his face was incredibly satisfying. He hates this, and I love it! I stepped backward into the room, pulled him in with me, shut the heavy oak door, and locked it. Click. Nobody is signing any contracts tonight, buddy. I looked up at him, fluttering my eyelashes. “Stay with me, Honey. I don’t want to be alone.” Since he wanted to play the protective fiancé to keep an eye on me, I was going to use my ‘fiancée’ privileges to take him hostage. I didn’t have pajamas, so after my shower, I threw on one of his oversized crisp white button-downs. I didn’t even bother drying my hair; I just walked straight out of the master bath, terrified he might have snuck out to make a business call. He hadn’t. He was pacing the length of the bedroom like a caged panther. The man had probably hit ten thousand steps just walking from the window to the bed. He glanced at me, and his face went instantly crimson, his eyes darting to the ceiling. He stammered, “I—I’m gonna go shower.” “Okay! Make sure you scrub behind your ears!” I chirped. He practically bolted into the bathroom. I sat cross-legged on his massive king-sized bed, bored out of my mind. I glanced over at his walk-in closet, the door slightly ajar. Hanging from the handle of a cedar drawer was a small, faded leather charm. It was the talisman from the monastery. The one Sloane had paraded around junior year. After high school, Nolan and I had gone to the same Ivy League university. As far as I knew, he never spoke to Sloane again. He was too busy making my life a living hell to date anyone. Freshman year, I mentioned I thought the point guard on the basketball team was cute. Nolan told me my taste was garbage. The next day, he organized a pickup game and absolutely humiliated the point guard on the court. As the guy limped away, Nolan stood next to me, dripping with sweat, and sneered, “That’s what you like? A crybaby?” Sophomore year, I said the captain of the tennis team had great arms. Nolan scoffed and told me I hadn’t seen anything. For the next month, he inexplicably started wearing fitted muscle tees around campus. In November. Valentine’s Day of our senior year, I complained to my friends that I wished I got flowers. That afternoon, a massive, elaborate arrangement arrived at my dorm. From Nolan. It was a wreath of white chrysanthemums. The kind you send to a funeral. My funeral, apparently. The bathroom door clicked open, pulling me out of my memories. Nolan stepped out, looking stiff and painfully awkward in a grey t-shirt and sweatpants. “You should get some sleep,” he said, moving toward his desk. “I’m just going to catch up on some emails.” My eyes widened. Hell no. He’s going to seal the deal! I scrambled off the bed, sprinting across the rug, and threw my arms around his waist from behind. “No! You can’t work!” Before he could react, I rested my chin against his spine, projecting maximum pathetic energy. “Babe, please stay with me. My head still hurts.” Nolan didn’t say a word. He just stood there for a second, then gently pried my hands off, turned around, and walked right back into the bathroom. Wait. Didn’t he just shower? Whatever. While he was in there, I lunged for his laptop, changed his login password, and reformatted his smart-room lock. I changed all the codes to my birthday. Checkmate. Tomorrow morning, I’m waking up first and sprinting to Declan’s hotel. A few minutes later, Nolan emerged again. He grabbed the Dyson hairdryer from the vanity and walked over to me. “Come here, Harp. Let me dry your hair.” I plopped down on the edge of the bed with a secret smile. Since I was the amnesiac fiancée, I was going to milk this for all it was worth. “Noly, the heat is too high.” “You missed a spot on the left.” “The ends are still damp, Nolan…” I was being an absolute nightmare, but Nolan didn’t show a flicker of annoyance. He just gently combed his fingers through my hair, adjusting the settings, his touch incredibly grounding. The hum of the dryer and the warmth of his hands were hypnotic. I felt my eyelids getting heavy. I leaned back into his stomach, the fight draining out of me. Damn it. I forgot the doctor had given me a mild sedative for the concussion. I was vaguely aware of the hairdryer turning off. Nolan’s body went completely still against my back. Gently, he scooped me up and laid me down on the mattress, pulling the heavy duvet over my shoulders. I felt the mattress shift as he started to pull away. Without thinking, my hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. “Nolan. Don’t go.” A long silence hung in the dark room. “I’m not going anywhere, Harp,” he whispered. “Go to sleep.” His body heat was a furnace against my back. The early autumn air outside was biting, but under the covers, I felt completely safe. I unconsciously curled closer, burying my face in his chest. Just before the medication dragged me under, I heard him let out a long, shaky exhale. “God, if only this were real,” he whispered into the dark. If what was real? I thought hazily. Does he actually want me to have brain damage?

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1 In the fifth year of our marriage, Meredith and I had another screaming match. I stormed out into the dark, took the keys, and ended up wrapped around a guardrail on Highway 9. After clawing my way back from the edge of cardiac arrest, something inside me went quiet. I stopped checking her location. I stopped demanding she cut ties with Austin Reed. I didn’t even yell when she came home smelling like rain and someone else’s cologne. Eventually, I just packed two duffels and moved into a sublet downtown. That was when Meredith changed. Suddenly, she was texting me her itinerary every morning before breakfast. She pulled strings to get me onto the calendar of the chief of orthopedic surgery at St. Jude’s, drove me to every single physical therapy session, and stood beside the parallel bars while I learned to put weight on my shattered knee again. She cooked three meals a day from scratch. She even took over tending the small urban jungle of potted ferns, orchids, and peace lilies I kept out on the terrace. My best friend, Toby, stopped by one afternoon and watched through the sliding glass door as Meredith knelt on the concrete, dusting the leaves of an olive tree with a damp cloth. “She cares more about your goddamn plants than you do,” Toby muttered, shaking his head. “Look at her. Maybe you two are finally getting back to how things used to be.” I offered him a thin, polite smile. “Maybe.” The next evening, Meredith came through the front door radiant, carrying a heavy brown sack tied with twine. “I drove all the way out to the university agricultural extension,” she said, out of breath, her eyes bright with an eager, pleading warmth. “The botanist mixed this custom fertilizer just for the varieties you have. He promised they’ll thrive.” I said nothing. Her smile collapsed the moment she stepped onto the terrace. The cedar shelves were bare. The terracotta pots, the hanging baskets, the delicate jade cuttings—everything was gone. Only a few scattered grains of dry potting soil remained, swept into the corner by the evening wind. The night of the crash had been absolute chaos. Meredith’s phone had gone straight to voicemail. Four times, then twelve, then forty. By the time Toby sprinted through the emergency room doors, I was already on the table, my chest cracked open, my femur in splinters. When the trauma surgeon came out to hand him the critical condition notice, Toby’s knees gave out right in the middle of the linoleum hallway. His voice shook so badly the charge nurse had to lean in to hear him. “Whatever it takes. Just keep him breathing. Please.” The surgeon didn’t have time for comfort. “We need immediate surgical consent from his legal next of kin. Is there a spouse? Parents?” My parents had died in a head-on collision when I was a junior in high school. Meredith Brooks was the only family I had left on paper. Toby dialed her again. This time, the call connected. Austin answered. He listened to Toby’s frantic, breathless explanation, paused, and let out a soft, measured sigh. “Meredith’s in the middle of a board pitch, Toby. She really doesn’t have time for this right now.” Toby hung up, ran out to his car, and broke three red lights getting to the Brooks Capital building. When he barged into the executive suite, Meredith barely blinked up from her financial models. “I’m in the middle of something critical, Toby. I’ll head over as soon as we close this.” Austin stepped between them, his voice calm, reasonable, and dripping with corporate poison. He explained that the entire division had been working eighty-hour weeks for a month to finalize this acquisition. Walking away at the eleventh hour would cost forty jobs. “This deal is the lifeblood of the firm,” Austin said gently, laying a hand on Meredith’s shoulder. “Throwing a wrench into things now wouldn’t be fair to the team. Jess wouldn’t want you to derail your career over a routine hospital stay. He’ll understand.” Meredith didn’t brush his hand off. She looked at Toby with that detached, executive practicality she had perfected over the last three years. “If something changes, have the attending page my office. And tell them to bill everything directly to my private account. Money isn’t an issue.” They moved in lockstep. A rehearsed duet of dismissals. Toby left the building in tears, dry-heaving in the parking garage. I didn’t come out of the ICU until the following afternoon. Machines breathed for me. Tubes snaked through my neck and wrists. Meredith didn’t show up until day five. She stood by the nurses’ station, signed a mountain of retrospective insurance forms, and capped her fountain pen, ready to walk straight back to the elevators. Toby intercepted her in the corridor. “You’re not even going to look at him?” Family was allowed inside for ten minutes every hour. Meredith hesitated, her fingers tightening around her leather folio. Austin, standing half a step behind her with a briefcase in hand, checked his watch and murmured, “Meredith, Harrison is waiting for us at the Union Club. We have twenty minutes.” She looked at the clock above the nurses’ station, then through the double glass doors of the intensive care unit where my bed lay hidden behind blue privacy curtains. “I need to handle this meeting first,” she said, her tone level, distant. “Once the contracts are locked, I’ll come back.” She turned and left with Austin. She didn’t look back once. She never returned to the ICU. By the time I was stable enough to be moved to a regular surgical step-down room, Toby was still the only person sitting in the vinyl armchair beside my bed. When I opened my eyes, the world was a dull, white blur of fluorescent tubes and antiseptic sting. Toby looked hollowed out, dark purple bruises under his eyes. He broke down the second he saw me looking at him. “You’re alive, Jess. You’re alive. Don’t worry about anything else. Just focus on healing.” Later that night, drifting in and out of a morphine haze, I heard Toby out in the stairwell. His voice was raw with fury, echoing against the concrete walls. “Meredith! Who the fuck is your husband? Him or Austin?” Silence on the line. Then Toby’s voice broke, sinking into a humiliated, desperate whisper. “Just ten minutes. You don’t have ten goddamn minutes? Jess has nobody else in this world. It’s just you.” I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to tell him to hang up, to come back inside, that I didn’t want to see her anyway. But the breathing tube had lacerated my vocal cords, my chest burned like wet ash, and I didn’t even have the strength to squeeze out a tear. Meredith finally appeared when I was already attempting my first unassisted steps. Toby had stepped out to meet the physical therapist. I was gripping the textured wall of the bathroom, dragging my useless right leg forward inch by agonizing inch, trying to make it back to the mattress. She stood in the doorway, startled, and reached out to catch me. Austin was faster. He slid between us, his grip steady on my elbow. “Let me, Meredith. You’re in silk, and you’ll throw your back out.” I flinched, trying to pull away, but my muscles were paper-thin; I had no leverage, no balance. Austin hoisted me up with effortless, performative gentleness and eased me back onto the mattress. He pulled the blanket over my knees, his voice quiet, melodic, entirely devoid of shame. He explained that he and Meredith had been in Zurich closing a secondary offering. “We only stayed so long because the firm needed the liquidity,” he said. He tucked the corner of the sheet under the mattress. “We didn’t call because we didn’t want you getting worked up. You were fragile, Jess. The last thing you needed was stress.” My chest heaved. Just crossing eight feet of linoleum had drained every drop of adrenaline I had left. I didn’t have the breath to counter him, nor the will to acknowledge the venom laced beneath his bedside manner. Seeing that I remained mute, Austin took out his phone. “We managed to catch an afternoon in Lake Lucerne before the meetings started,” he said, tilting the screen toward my face. “The scenery was incredible. Meredith said that once you’re on crutches, she wants to fly you out there so you can get some fresh air.” On the screen, the two of them stood on a wooden dock at twilight. The alpine lake behind them was mirrors of violet and gold. Austin was laughing into her ear, and Meredith was looking at him with her head tilted, the setting sun catching the curve of her cheek. It was a gorgeous photograph. Balanced. Complete. Two people carved out of the same polished stone. I stared at the screen, feeling an odd, weightless detachment. I didn’t feel rage. I didn’t feel sorrow. I just felt an enormous, quiet emptiness, like looking at an oil painting of strangers in a museum. My silence clearly unnerved Austin. He lowered the phone, glancing back at Meredith with wide, troubled eyes. “Meredith… did I say something wrong?” Meredith stepped up beside him, her gaze resting heavily on my sunken face. “Austin was just trying to give you something to look forward to, Jess.” I swallowed the metallic taste of copper in the back of my throat. My voice was a rasp, thin as parchment. “What kind of reaction was he hoping for?” She froze. The corner of my mouth twitched into something resembling a smile. “Was I supposed to scream? Throw a pitcher of water at the wall? So he could duck behind you, murmuring about how he only had good intentions, while you tell me how unreasonable and bitter I’ve become?” I pictured the choreography of it all, and a dry, rasping laugh slipped out of my throat. “I’m sorry. I really can’t perform for you two today. I just bought my life back from the morgue. I don’t have the energy for the theater.” Austin’s eyes welled with tears instantly. “Jesse, you’re twisting my words. I knew you went through hell out there on the road. I honestly thought seeing some daylight would give you hope. I swear, that’s all it was.” The tears spilled over, neat and tragic. Meredith reached over, resting a hand against the small of his back, her voice instinctively softening. “I know, Austin. It’s okay. Nobody blames you.” Then she turned to me, the tenderness instantly replaced by an exhausted, disciplinary frost. “Jesse, you were speeding in a downpour because you lost your temper. You put yourself in this bed. You don’t get to take that out on Austin.” Reckless. That had always been Meredith’s diagnosis of my character. Two years ago, when a drunk driver shattered my kneecap at a crosswalk, Austin had just joined the company as a junior partner. He told Meredith that I needed six months of total cognitive rest; he offered to take over the real estate portfolios I had spent three years building from scratch. I had dragged myself into Meredith’s home office on a cane. She didn’t even look up from her laptop. “Austin is looking out for your recovery, Jess. Don’t throw a tantrum.” Those accounts were already in their closing phase. Austin didn’t have to negotiate a single term; he simply stepped in, signed the final transfer deeds, and pocketed the commissions. With those numbers on his ledger, he secured his seat as Meredith’s indispensable right hand within three months. I had been bitter, my physical therapy stalled, and the chronic pain kept me awake until dawn. I lost twenty pounds in four months. Austin noticed. He suggested that city air was toxic for nerve regeneration. He found a private, holistic retreat nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains—isolated, serene, perfect for convalescence. I fought her on it with everything I had. We screamed at each other until the neighbors called building security. Meredith looked at me with an icy, clinical disgust. “This is your health we’re talking about. This isn’t a playground for your bruised ego.” The next morning, she had two private drivers pack my bags and take me up the mountain. The facility sat behind iron gates. No cell towers. No taxi service. A landline in the administrative office that required medical clearance to use. I was trapped with a half-healed knee and a walking stick. The third time I tried to walk down the access road to find a highway, I slipped on wet shale and tumbled forty feet down a ravine. My left humerus cracked, my tibia shattered, and the repaired knee was pulverized beyond surgical salvage. By the time Meredith arrived at the county hospital, her expression was black with fury. “Jesse Evans, when are you going to stop acting like a spoiled child?” Austin stood behind her, murmuring softly, “Don’t be too hard on him, Meredith. It was an accident. He just missed home.” Meredith’s voice cut like a razor. “If he had an ounce of your discipline, his leg wouldn’t be permanently ruined.” Not a single question about whether the bone was set properly. No touch to my forehead. Just an itemized list of my failures as an adult. When the cast came off and I told her I was coming back to the office, Austin blocked the doorway of our loft. “Your body comes first, Jess. I have everything under control at Brooks Capital. You don’t have to lift a finger. I’m doing this for you.” Meredith stood beside him, buttoning her cuffs. “Listen to Austin. Stay home. Don’t embarrass yourself with another scene.” They had stood there, shoulder to shoulder, slowly eroding my boundaries, stripping my authority, taking over the firm we had built from a two-room basement, until every objection I made sounded like the raving of a madman. I had looked at her that evening and asked, “Does he dictate everything now? Do I have to ask his permission to breathe?” Meredith had looked away, exhaling through her nose. “Jess, Austin and I were over seven years ago. We closed that chapter. You’re seeing ghosts because you’re insecure. If I still wanted him, do you really think I would have married you?” Standing there in the hallway, leaning on my cane, the reality of it had finally hit me. She had never closed that chapter. It was simply frozen in amber. They had met in their prep-school uniforms, survived college together, shared five years of incandescent, unbroken first love. Those years aren’t washed away by time or distance; they remain an immaculate ghost living in the walls. As Meredith herself had let slip during one of our drunken anniversaries: if Austin hadn’t vanished overseas during her mother’s worst scandals, Jesse Evans would never have entered the frame. I was the substitute who held the flashlight while she patched the ceiling. Yet I had refused to accept it. Why should the ghost of their sacred youth be bought with my flesh and blood? Shaking with humiliation and rage, I had clung to the final shred of hope I had left in her. “Fire him. Let him go, and let’s fix this. I won’t yell. I won’t bring it up again. I’ll do the physical therapy. Just get him out of our lives.” Meredith had looked at me with eyes as flat as slate. “His performance metrics are undeniable. I don’t fire people who generate twelve million in net revenue a quarter. Frankly, Jess, he runs those divisions better than you ever did.” The words had knocked the wind out of me. I looked at her, breathing hard. “You two really are made for each other. You’re cold and opportunistic, and he’s a shameless parasite.” Her face went white with anger. “Watch your mouth, Jesse.” That night had devolved into the most vicious fight of our five years together. Every old resentment was weaponized. Every scar exposed. In the end, standing in our minimalist foyer, I pointed directly at the faint, pale line running vertically between her eyebrows—the scar from her childhood. “No wonder your father packed his bags and left in the middle of the night,” I spat, every word designed to draw blood. “Even when you were eight years old, clinging to his coat in the driveway, begging him to stay, he didn’t look back once. He knew what kind of ungrateful, hollow creature he was leaving behind.” Meredith’s father had walked out when she was eight. Her mother was a chronic gambler who had run through three mortgages and loan sharks. The night her father left, Meredith had dragged herself down the gravel driveway in her pajamas, clutching the hem of his wool coat, screaming until her throat bled. Her father had reached down, peeled her small fingers off his sleeve one by one, and said, “You have her blood, Meredith. I can’t take the risk.” Her childhood had been an endless corridor of debt collectors and eviction notices. When she met Austin in college, she thought he was her ticket out of the gutter. But the moment Austin realized her mother was facing felony fraud charges, he took a scholarship abroad and left without leaving a forwarding address. She had nearly jumped off the pedestrian bridge over the river. I was walking home from my shift at the print shop when I grabbed her jacket and hauled her back over the railing. When we started dating, she cried the first time her mother’s creditors called our apartment. I had pulled her close and said, “I’m not scared of them. Every time they show up, I’ll deal with them. You don’t have to run anymore.” Meredith had buried her face in my shoulder, her tears soaking through my shirt. “If you’re not scared, Jess, then I’m not scared either. You’re my home.” We got married at City Hall on a rainy Tuesday. No family. No church. No celebration. Both of my parents were six feet under; her family was a wreckage she wanted to erase. We had only each other. We built Brooks Capital from zero. Fourteen-hour days on stale coffee and bodega sandwiches. I thought our foundation was unbreakable. Then Austin returned, polished, well-connected, his family name restored. Meredith handed him an executive suite before the ink on his resume was dry. “He had no choice back then,” she told me. “His family forced him to leave.” The bridge I had spent five years building with my bare hands became the platform Austin strolled across to take his place beside her. Whenever I threatened divorce during our arguments, Meredith would just look at me with cool indifference. “You’re emotional. Go sleep in the guest room. We’ll talk when you’re rational.” Then, two days later, there would be a bouquet of white peonies on the counter, an Italian silk tie draped over my briefcase, and a braised beef stew simmering on the stove. The slate was wiped clean, without an apology, leaving me alone in the dark to choke on my own grief. Until that night. Until I brought up her father. After the words left my mouth, the room fell terrifyingly still. Meredith stood frozen under the chandelier, staring at me with an expression that had stripped away all anger, all irritation, leaving only a vast, terrifying void. A long moment passed. Then she spoke, her voice chillingly quiet. “Jesse Evans. Let’s get a divorce.” Panic hit me like ice water. In five years of bitter, screaming fights, she had never once uttered that word. Even when I had thrown a draft of a separation agreement into her lap, she had merely picked it up and dropped it into the fireplace without looking at it. This time, she meant it. I couldn’t bear to look at the cold finality in her eyes. I grabbed my keys, stumbled out into the torrential rain, and drove blindly into the dark. Then came the headlights, the hydroplane, the crunch of tearing steel. When I woke up in the trauma ward to Toby’s red-rimmed eyes, my mind was too broken and concussed to process the grief. But deep down, beneath the fractured ribs and the morphine haze, a quiet sigh of relief had settled into my marrow. It was over. Finally. Perhaps dying once has a way of resetting a person’s tolerance for nonsense. When I saw Austin standing in my hospital room with his curated photographs, I felt entirely immune to his existence. When Toby returned with two hospital security guards and escorted Austin out into the hall, Meredith lingered by the door, looking back at me with a complicated, guarded tension. “Tell your corporate counsel to draw up the separation agreement,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. Meredith stopped dead. “What?” Beside her, Toby let out a sharp, incredulous breath. “Jess… you mean it?” I nodded slowly, letting my head rest back against the thin hospital pillow. “Yeah,” I said, staring at the ceiling tiles. “You were right that night, Meredith. Let’s get divorced. I agree.”

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Ethan Cole had been chasing my mom for years. She’d turned him down clearly and repeatedly. And he still had the nerve to grin at me and say, “Kid, when I finally win your mom over, remember to call me Dad.” He got on my last nerve. So I tied him up and tossed him onto the bed. Then I slapped his broad pecs until they swelled and grabbed him by the hair. “Is this what a father looks like after his son leaves him too wrecked to crawl?” “Stop hounding my mom.” “Or every time I see you, I’ll make you regret it.” 01 The brooch Ethan Cole had given my mom? She refused to keep it. He turned around and tossed it to me. “A little early gift from Dad, for when you start calling me that.” “It’s expensive, too.” I wasn’t taking his gift, and I certainly wasn’t accepting his favor. I gave his shin a light kick. “My dad is dead. If you want to join him, I’ll call you Dad.” He didn’t get angry. He just hooked an arm around my neck with a goofy grin. The warm, masculine scent of his cologne filled my senses. But there was nothing dignified about him. He acted nothing like a man who had just turned thirty. He blew lightly against my ear. “What a rude little mutt.” “Even if I’m not your dad, I’m still your uncle. Is that how you talk to your elders?” 02 That was exactly why having him as my uncle made it worse. Ethan Cole had lost both parents when he was young. Our families had always been close, so my grandparents took him in and raised him. My mom was eleven years older than him. He called her Sis. They’d grown up together. Later, my mom and dad fell in love and got married. By the time I was old enough to run around, teenage Ethan Cole had started chasing my mom. Trying to wreck my parents’ marriage would have been bad enough. But right after my dad died, Ethan doubled down and moved straight into our house. He’d been camped out there for years. I told him, “A toad like you has no business dreaming of a swan.” Smiling, he held up one knuckle. Then he slipped it between my lips and pressed it against one of my canine teeth. When he pulled it out, a faint tooth mark was left on his fingertip. He waved it in front of me. “Look at that. The little toad has fangs.” Immature. Stupidly, unbelievably immature. 03 Our apartment only had two bedrooms, and my mom usually came home late. Ethan insisted on waiting for her so he could make her a late-night snack before leaving. After cooking, he somehow kept chatting until it was too late and he was “too tired” to go home. So he squeezed into my bed again. Over the years, he’d taken over my bed often enough that several sets of his pajamas had ended up in my closet. He was a restless sleeper. One minute he’d roll over; the next, he’d throw a leg across my stomach. When I woke in a haze, it felt like I was wrapped up with an octopus. Warm breath brushed my neck, tickling my skin. I was just about to push him away when he mumbled, “Claire…” That was my mom’s name. Something hard pressed against the side of my thigh. I woke all the way up. Before I could even process the disgust, he leaned toward me. His lips landed on mine without warning. Heat shot straight through me. I shook with rage and kicked him out of bed. Ethan hit the floor with a dull thud and a breathless groan. He didn’t even get mad. Sitting there, dazed, he looked up at me. “What happened? Bad dream?” I smiled through my clenched teeth. “Yeah. Dreamed a dog bit me.” The shameless bastard still tried to climb back into bed, half-asleep. He reached for me. “Let me rub your ears. There, there. Bad dream, be gone.” I slapped his hand away. “Don’t touch me. Get out!” His hand stopped in midair. After several seconds, he slowly pulled back the knee he’d planted on my mattress. He looked a little annoyed now, too. He stripped off his pajama top and threw it straight at my face, almost like he was getting even. “Such a brat. You’re young, but you’ve got a hell of a temper.” By the time the shirt slid off my face, he was gone. I took a furious breath, only for his scent to flood my nose again. Pushy, overbearing, and impossible. I punched his pajamas twice, just to vent. “Damn it. What a jerk.” 04 These days, just seeing Ethan Cole made my whole body feel wrong. So I started taking the long way around him. He blocked the front door one day and asked, “What did I do to offend you now, Your Highness?” My eyes flicked over his full lips. I looked away fast. “Good dogs don’t block the door.” I didn’t expect him to be that shameless. He leaned close and murmured by my ear, “Woof. Can we make up now? Don’t talk trash about me in front of your mom.” I told him I had a summer job and would be late if I didn’t leave. After a few steps, I remembered something and glanced back. Ethan was still standing there with his arms crossed, smiling at me. “I’m not making up with you. We were never friends in the first place.” The restaurant was slammed with the dinner rush. Then I got stuck with an especially obnoxious customer. Pouring his drink wasn’t enough. He kept teasing me. “Aren’t you a little young to be waiting tables?” “Come stand beside me and keep my glass full. I’ll tip you.” I refused. “Sorry, I also have a few private rooms to cover.” “If you need anything, please call me.” When I tried to leave, he grabbed my hand. The unfamiliar touch made my stomach turn. I jerked away as if I’d been burned. He stared at me, his face going through several shades of red and white. Then he glanced at the other people at the table. His temper exploded. He picked up his wineglass and threw the drink in my face. “What kind of service is that? I’m spending hundreds of dollars on dinner here!” “Some punk who hasn’t even grown his first beard thinks he can give me attitude?” “Get your manager!” I was still trying to figure out what to say when the private-room door swung open. Of course it was Ethan Cole—the man I’d just said I would never make up with. Our eyes met, and mine immediately slid away from his flushed lips. The customer looked at Ethan, and his whole expression changed. “Mr. Cole! What a coincidence. I didn’t know you ate here.” Ethan walked in. “I heard something going on in here.” The customer hurried over with a smile. “Nothing serious. Just a disrespectful server.” “I’ll complain to the manager and take care of it.” “Are you entertaining clients tonight?” Ethan shook his head. “No. My kid is working here for the summer, getting a little life experience. I came to check on him.” The customer immediately started flattering him. “Of course someone from the Cole family is different.” “If I’m lucky enough to see your young man here next time I come in, I’ll make sure he’s taken care of.” Ethan smiled. “Hear that, Julian? Mr. Carter says he’ll take care of you.” “Come here.” 05 He called me over. Mr. Carter’s face turned awkward in an instant. Ethan acted as if he hadn’t noticed. He simply reached out and wiped the wine from my chin. “What happened, little mess?” I was supposed to hate Ethan Cole. But his touch was so gentle. Gentle enough to make a dull ache rise in my chest. My voice came out almost plaintive, like I was looking for shelter. “He threw it at me.” Ethan pretended not to know. “Who would dare?” Then he turned to Mr. Carter. “You saw what happened, right?” “This kid has been spoiled rotten since he was little. I’ve always held him in the palm of my hand.” “He’s never had to suffer a single indignity, and the one time he’s out of my sight, this happens.” He looked back at me. “Who was it?” Before I could answer, Mr. Carter broke. He grabbed napkins and bent over to wipe my clothes. “I’m sorry. You see, we ran into an old acquaintance.” “My fault. I’d had too much to drink and didn’t recognize you.” “I sincerely apologize.” I’d never seen this kind of adult double-dealing up close. I’d never seen someone so much older than me bow and scrape, either. The unfamiliarity of it made me look at Ethan again without thinking. He smiled at me, his eyes crinkling. “Speak up, little prince.” “If you’re still upset, somebody’s about to have a very bad night.” A sheen of cold sweat appeared on Mr. Carter’s nose. I pressed my lips together. “It’s fine now.” 06 He took me away from the restaurant. “Come to my place and change. Your mom will worry if you go home like this.” He said it was for my mom. I appreciated it anyway. In his car, I murmured, “Thanks.” He’d clearly heard me, but he leaned over to tease me. “Hmm? What was that?” I turned my head and met his amused eyes. He was focused on me, close enough that his breath tangled with mine. I wet my lips and immediately faced forward again. “I said thanks!” He laughed, and the hand he ran through my hair only made a mess of my thoughts. 07 His place was enormous—a penthouse apartment that was several thousand square feet. I rarely went there, and every time I did, I complained. “Your place is this huge, and you still come crowd into my apartment every night.” He ignored that and told me to stay. He buzzed around like a busy bee, finding me clean clothes and a fresh towel. He changed the sheets, adjusted the humidifier, and lit a scented candle. It was more preparation than I’d ever needed to sleep in my own bed. Even after I burrowed under the covers, he kept planning cheerfully. “Hey, do you want to take a bath?” “I’ll have someone clean the tub tomorrow. You can soak for a while.” “What do you want for breakfast?” I couldn’t understand him. After spending all these years throwing himself at a brick wall in my house, wasn’t he tired of it? “Isn’t this a lot of trouble?” He leaned against the doorframe and smiled. “Not at all. The place finally feels lived-in.” “It’s usually pretty empty.” Moonlight washed over him, giving his whole figure a hazy, lonely look. I stared at his face, my thoughts tangled. For one strange second, Ethan Cole didn’t seem quite so unbearable. He turned to leave, and before I could think better of it, I called him back. He looked over his shoulder seriously, almost hopeful that I had more to say. I pressed my lips together, then said, “We’re good.” Ethan blinked, then broke into a smile. He walked to my bed and bent over me. The scent of him made my thighs clench before I could stop them. He brushed one fingertip across my nose. “Good night, brat.” 08 My mom always told me, “Your uncle is lonely. He’s had a hard life. You don’t have to be so hostile to him all the time.” For the first time, I thought I understood a little. I’d barely started seeing Ethan differently when he made another grand confession to my mom. An apartment building has no shortage of gossip. The neighbors downstairs were whispering, “Oh, please. He says he’s her little brother, but he’s sending her roses now.” “When Claire Bennett’s husband was still alive, that brother of hers was always showing up.” “They must have had something going on back then, too.” “Shameless.” My temper flared. I leaned over the second-floor railing and called down, “Gossiping about people behind their backs brings bad luck, you know?” Their expressions changed. “Watch your mouth!” “I’m talking to you the way you’re talking about other people.” When I got home, the roses still hadn’t been cleared away. My mom sat at the table, her eyes red as she wiped my dad’s framed photo. My heart clenched. My mom was such a strong woman. But she could still cry like she’d been hurt beyond words. She said, “If your dad were here, maybe there wouldn’t be so many rumors.” 09 I didn’t blame my dad for being gone. I blamed that idiot Ethan Cole. Furious, I stormed to his place. He was drunk, being helped out of a car by a beautiful woman. They looked far too familiar with each other. My clenched fists wouldn’t stop shaking. I took him from the woman, dragged him inside, and threw him onto the bed. Ethan looked miserable, his whole body flushed and burning hot. I grabbed his tie, wanting to choke him with it. “Ethan Cole, this is your final warning.” “If you ever dare to—” His mouth cut me off. He murmured, unfocused, “Come on. Let me do it…” I stopped cold. My fury plunged into ice. I heard my teeth click together. “What?” My voice came out cold enough to freeze. He fumbled at my clothes. “Give me…” “What the hell do you want?” A hard slap stopped him. I grabbed him by the throat and cursed. “You act like some tragic romantic while making my mom’s life miserable.” “And then you turn around and try to get into bed with someone else.” “You really think you get to have everything?” “You piece of trash—what gives you the right to chase my mom?” There were rules about not hitting someone in the face, especially not like that. I was his nephew. I was a full ten years younger than him. Ethan’s unfocused eyes cleared a little. For the first time, the man who was always smiling looked angry. His chest rose and fell hard beneath my palm. Heat radiated through his shirt, hot enough to burn me. “No right? Have I ever treated you badly? Have I ever treated your mom badly?” “Neither my mom nor I need anything from a filthy bastard like you!” “Do you hear me?” Ethan’s eyes burned red. The hand gripping my arm stood out with veins. Anyone would lose it after being cursed out by someone younger. Ethan was no exception. “Filthy bastard? Am I in bed with someone right now?” “No.” “I’m going after her, and no one’s going to stop me.” “You little bastard. I’ve treated you right for years, and this is what I get?” “Wait until I’m your dad. Then you can yell at me.” 10 That one line poured gasoline on the fire. I had never met anyone so shameless. Treating me right? Was that what he called watching my mom get worn down by his pursuit while the neighbors talked? Was it treating me right to start discussing my “new dad” when my father’s body was barely cold? Any good opinion I’d formed of him had clearly been a concussion. I pinned him down, my voice frighteningly calm. “You still want to be my dad?”

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1 On my nineteenth trip abroad, Justin bypassed tourist spots again, dragging me into a dense rainforest. Insects crawled through mud, guttural calls echoed. I clutched his sleeve, pleading we turn back. He ignored me, eyes fixed on his phone’s blinking red dot. A viper coiled around my calf. I reached for Justin, but he leapt forward, catching Renee, his childhood best friend who’d vanished two years ago, as she jumped from a tree. “Took you long enough,” she teased, arms around his neck. “I promised I’d bring you home,” he murmured. I collapsed onto the mud, blood pouring from the snakebite. The truth hit: nineteen trips weren’t memories for us. They were cover while he hunted her. He’d promised marriage after our travels. I’d followed him through deserts, rapids, and snow-capped peaks. All I got was a man whose eyes held only another woman. I was exhausted. His journey was over. And so were we. … The rental car broke down right when the rain started to fall. Justin popped the hood, checking the engine while dialing emergency services. He scowled, his face full of annoyance. “You really need to watch where you’re walking,” he snapped at me. “Now we all have to waste time waiting for an ambulance because of you.” I sat helplessly on the muddy shoulder of the road. Listening to his complaints, I didn’t even have the energy to respond. Looking up, I saw Justin and Renee wearing full-body protective gear. I was wearing ordinary hiking clothes. Justin hadn’t told me our final destination, nor had he prepared any gear for me. He hadn’t even spared me a single glance when the snake bit me. Tears mixed with the rain, dripping onto the blood-stained mud beneath me. By the time the ambulance arrived, my consciousness was fading fast. Justin and Renee climbed into the back with me. He held my hand, but his head was turned completely toward Renee, a soft smile playing on his lips. “I left the hotel in the middle of the night,” Justin said softly to her. “I was terrified you’d run away again if I was a minute late. Don’t pull a stunt like this ever again. Do you have any idea what the last two years have been like for me?” As he spoke, his grip on my hand tightened painfully. I knew that intensity wasn’t meant for me. Renee tossed her hair back, looking thoroughly pleased with herself. “That was your punishment! You have to remember: the first peeled shrimp always goes into my bowl!” Justin offered her an indulgent laugh. “Alright. I promise.” As darkness pulled me under, their conversation echoed relentlessly in my mind. Two years ago, Renee had stormed off and vanished simply because Justin placed a single peeled shrimp in my bowl at dinner. Yet I was supposed to be his fiancée. Justin and Renee grew up together. When I met her for the first time, she smiled and called me “sister,” but her arm naturally slid through Justin’s. Justin had told me not to overthink it. “I only see her as a little sister.” But do normal siblings bathe together and scrub each other’s backs? Renee had endless demands. She insisted on riding shotgun in his car, demanded that Justin hand-feed her, and forced him into fitting rooms to zip up her dresses. Her total lack of boundaries chilled my heart time and time again. I had fought with Justin over it. Seeing his complete lack of remorse, the thought of breaking up crossed my mind for the very first time. Pathologically, that was when Renee vanished, and Justin suddenly insisted on taking me on a world tour. He never mentioned Renee’s name. He claimed that traveling together before marriage would help us understand each other better, promising we’d tie the knot the moment we returned. He thoughtfully packed my bags, swaying my resolve to leave. During the trip, I noticed something was off. Sometimes he insisted on staying in a single city for three months; other times, he demanded we board a flight the moment we landed. “Can’t we explore a little?” I had asked him at an airport terminal, feeling exhausted. “I heard the local food here is amazing.” Justin had kept his head down, staring intently at the red dot on his phone screen. “It’s all tourist traps. The scenic spots are overcrowded. Just look up pictures online.” It wasn’t until today that I finally understood: the red dot he monitored twenty-four hours a day was Renee’s real-time GPS location. She ran, and he chased. A wave of overwhelming grief jolted me back into a brief state of consciousness. Their voices drifted into my ears once more. “Why did you even bring Sadie along?” Renee complained softly. “To cook for me,” Justin replied casually. “You know how sensitive my stomach is.” Yes, we all knew how delicate Justin’s digestive system was. Ever since I got together with him, I had been meticulous about his diet. Even while traveling, I did my best to buy fresh groceries and cook his meals personally. It turned out I had treated him too well, so well that he forgot how I had spent countless nights hunched over toilet bowls, throwing up from severe motion sickness and unfamiliar food. In Justin’s eyes, I was nothing more than a glorified live-in maid. Renee never cared about his health. Whenever she wanted something, Justin would indulge her without question. Once, he ate ultra-spicy hotpot with her and ended up collapsed on the floor in agony from acute gastritis. Yet the next time she invited him out, he went without hesitation. I had once thought Justin was just too polite to say no, so I offered to decline her invitations on his behalf. Before I could even finish my sentence, Justin had snatched my phone away. “Renee just wants to eat hotpot. What did she do wrong?” Right. She did nothing wrong. So what did I do wrong? All I wanted was a loving, complete outcome for our relationship. All I wanted was for the man I loved to have eyes only for me. He couldn’t do it. And I was done waiting. When I woke up, the hospital room was completely empty. I picked up my phone from the nightstand and saw a text Justin had sent two days ago: [The hospital is too depressing, so we left first. The bills are paid. Get some rest, and I’ll bring you a souvenir when we get back.] Staring at those cold words, a bitter, self-deprecating smile touched my lips. Right then, my phone pushed a notification for Renee’s latest social media update. They had visited the city’s most famous cathedral, waited in line for viral ice cream, and taken dozens of intimate photos along the beach. In the photos, Justin was smiling brighter than I had ever seen in five years. We had been together for half a decade, yet looking at him now felt like watching a complete stranger flaunt his happiness with someone else. He claimed he hated crowds, yet he abandoned every single one of his rules for Renee. Or rather, Renee was his only rule. I stared at those photos for a long time, unable to process the hollow ache in my chest, until the doctor walked into the room. I couldn’t understand a word of the local language. Seeing the solemn expressions on their faces, an unsettling dread filled my heart. With trembling hands, I pulled up a translation app on my phone. The cold, robotic voice translated the doctor’s words: “We were unable to save your baby.” My hands went limp, and the phone crashed onto the floor. The sharp sound echoed in the quiet room, shattering my heart into pieces. I refused to accept it. I gestured frantically, trying to double-check with the doctor. In that moment, I desperately prayed that the translation app was broken. When the doctor offered a solemn, confirming nod, all the strength drained from my body. My hands drifted unconsciously down to my flat stomach. Justin suffered from severe oligospermia, and my uterus had been severely damaged from a previous miscarriage years ago. This was supposed to be our last chance at having a child. If I hadn’t followed him into that rainforest, if I hadn’t been bitten by that snake, my baby might still be alive inside me. It was too late. Grief and resentment consumed me, but I still forced myself to call Justin. He deserved to know. It was his child, too. The phone rang endlessly. It wasn’t until the thirteenth call that he finally picked up. Justin’s impatient voice blasted through the receiver. “You’re awake? We’re very busy right now, we’ll talk later.” Hearing his voice, tears spilled down my cheeks. “Justin… our baby is gone,” I choked out, struggling to string the words together. Justin hesitated for a single second before letting out a mocking laugh. “Our baby? Sadie, come up with a better lie next time. Trying to trick me into coming back with a stunt like that is pathetic.” I froze, stunned into silence. He didn’t believe me. I had told him about the pregnancy weeks ago. He had nodded while sitting right beside me. He hadn’t listened to a single word I said. Justin loved me even less than I had imagined. I forced down the lump in my throat, trying to explain again, but the loud chime of an airport boarding announcement rang over the line. My heart skipped a beat. “Justin, where are you?” He fell silent for a moment before moving to a quieter spot. “Renee wants to go home.” The final thread holding my composure together snapped. “So?” I wept. “You just abandoned me? Justin, I’m still in the hospital!” I never imagined he could be this heartless. He had left me stranded in a foreign country without a second thought, all for Renee. “Who knew when you’d wake up?” Justin replied, his tone flat and unbothered, as if discussing the weather. “You can’t expect us to wait around forever.” A moment later, Renee’s voice drifted into the background. “Sadie, you’re so independent, I’m sure you can manage to fly home on your own, right? We’ll be waiting for you back home!” Home? That was never my home. In a foreign land, unable to speak the language, I handled my own discharge paperwork and dragged my exhausted body back to the hotel. The room was in disarray. Justin’s jacket was still tossed over the sofa, evidence of how hurriedly they had packed, terrified I might wake up and slow them down. I numbly packed my belongings. While clearing out the nightstand, I found Justin’s old tablet tucked between the mattress and the frame. His messaging account was still logged in. After a brief hesitation, I tapped on his chat thread with Renee. Even though they had seen each other every day, their chat history was endless. Justin sent her pictures of fallen leaves on his morning commute, ordered extra portions of food whenever he found a good restaurant, and replied to her messages instantly, even during major corporate meetings. Everything he gave to Renee was something I had spent five years praying for. My chat window with Justin was always dead silent. No matter what I sent, he replied with a single, transactional “Okay.” I let out a soft, bitter laugh. My fingers scrolled upward through the logs, landing on the day Renee had vanished two years ago. Justin had sent hundreds of frantic texts and made dozens of calls. [Renee, where are you running off to?] [Please stop scaring me. Just send me one message, please.] [I was wrong. I promise I’ll peel the shrimp for you first next time.] Even through plain text, I could feel his desperation and guilt. The words “I’m sorry” appeared repeatedly. Early the next morning, Renee had finally replied: [If you can find me, I’ll forgive you and go back with you.] Attached was a blurry photo of an unnamed highway. Renee always dropped subtle clues, and no matter how cryptic they were, Justin never complained. He simply replied: [Wait for me.] Then he transferred money directly to her bank account with a note: [Don’t skimp on yourself.] Seeing this version of Justin left me thoroughly stunned. He had never worried about me. When I was once stranded on a mountain during a storm for a day and a night, Justin didn’t make a single call. When I finally dragged myself home, exhausted and bruised, he merely offered a cold remark. “I’m very busy. I don’t have time to deal with trivial matters.” When I suffered my first miscarriage, bleeding heavily on a hospital bed with my life hanging by a thread, Justin hadn’t answered his phone once. He was attending an art exhibition with Renee. It wasn’t until I was discharged that he casually drove over with Renee to pick me up. “Your constitution is too weak,” he had said, his tone as light as air. “You need to exercise more.” I wasn’t blind to his blatant favoritism. I had once deliberately left home for a few days, desperate to see if he would worry about me. He didn’t. He worked as usual and went out drinking with his friends at night, a smile glued to his face. “She’ll come back on her own,” he had told his friends confidently. Justin was certain that my love for him would keep me by his side forever, certain that I would forgive everything he did. But long before I loved him, I loved myself. I calmly shut down the tablet. I booked two one-way flight tickets. One to Chicago to pack up my remaining life. And one to Seattle, to erase Justin from my existence entirely. After a grueling ten-hour flight, I landed in Chicago, only to find an electronic invitation waiting in my inbox. A welcome-back party for Renee was being held at The Grand Plaza Hotel. It was the exact venue I had booked months ago for our wedding. Every single detail of the ballroom had been designed by me. Yet the woman standing in the spotlight wasn’t me. On Renee’s social media feed, the venue looked almost identical to my original wedding vision, except every single red rose had been replaced with white Lisianthus flowers. [Thank you to Justin for flying these flowers in! I love them so much!] In the photo, Justin’s reflection in the glass was slightly blurred, but the tender, affectionate smile on his face was unmistakable. Of course. Justin had always insisted that whatever Renee wanted, she would get. In this relationship, I had always been the outsider. Being squeezed in the middle was unbearable. I hated it. Returning to our apartment, I packed my bags without stopping for a moment. Everything connected to Justin was left behind. While I was packing, my phone rang. It was Justin. He lowered his voice, his tone sharp and hurried. “Are you back in Chicago? Hurry up and bring the gift on the desk over to the hotel. I was in a rush and forgot it.” I walked over to the desk. Sitting right in the center was an exquisite velvet jewelry box. Inside was a limited-edition diamond ring—one of only three in the entire city. “Justin, sending a ring to a friend isn’t appropriate, is it?” I said quietly. When this ring was first released, Justin had promised he would fight to buy it for me as a wedding band. Now, that promise had been completely wiped from his mind. Justin’s tone turned impatient. “What’s inappropriate about it? Renee likes it.” “You’re getting jealous over nothing again. It’s just a ring. I’ll buy you another one later.” I let out a faint smile. What I wanted was never just a ring. In the hotel ballroom, Justin was pacing like a nervous wreck, shuffling his feet to hide his anxiety. “It’s still not here? Can’t you hurry her up?” he grumbled to his friend. When the courier finally appeared at the door, the weight on Justin’s chest lifted. However, the courier didn’t just deliver the ring box. He also handed over two official medical reports. One was my hospital discharge report for a complete miscarriage. The other was an official medical diagnostic report confirming Justin’s severe oligospermia. Justin’s eyes widened in horror. His fingers began to tremble uncontrollably. “This… this is impossible…”

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1 On our fifth anniversary, Laurie flaked at the last minute, claiming a sudden emergency at the office. Seeing how crushed I was, my best friend, Jasper, and my younger brother, Sam, offered to take me to the amusement park. All day long, they went out of their way to pamper me, buying cotton candy and waiting in line for roller coasters. I genuinely thought they just couldn’t stand seeing me down. That was until I went to grab drinks and overheard them whispering behind the vending machines. Jasper lowered his voice. “Laurie blew off their fifth anniversary just to chase the Northern Lights in Iceland with Simon.” Sam shrugged it off. “She’s just helping her first love cross an item off his bucket list. So what? At the end of the day, she’s still marrying my brother.” Jasper let out a quiet chuckle. “We just need to keep Sean distracted until tonight so he doesn’t catch on.” Standing behind the vending machine, a wave of bitter irony washed over me. What I mistook for sympathy was nothing more than an elaborate cover story orchestrated by the people I trusted most. I tossed the drinks into the trash, turned on my heel, and walked out of the park. I pulled out my phone and sent Laurie one final text: You can watch the Northern Lights with him. You can give him the rest of your life, too. Then, I blocked her. I left every group chat with Jasper and my brother. I was done playing my part in a circus where everyone knew the script except me. I hadn’t been walking for ten minutes before Sam caught up to me. He grabbed my wrist, showing no guilt whatsoever, only annoyance. “Sean, why are you running off like that? Jasper waited in line for an hour to get fireworks tickets.” Jasper rushed over too, shoving his phone back into his pocket. “We were just chatting casually. Why do you always take things out of context?” I looked at them. “What was the context I missed?” Sam choked on his words for a second, then scowled. “Simon has had severe trauma since he survived that avalanche two years ago. The doctor said going back to an aurora observation site helps with recovery. What’s wrong with Laurie keeping him company?” “So there was no emergency at the office.” “Laurie was just worried you’d overthink things,” Jasper said, softening his tone. “Sean, she’s planning to propose to you as soon as she gets back. Why ruin a five-year relationship over something so small?” I suddenly laughed out loud. They had mapped out my entire day, calculating when I should eat and when I should watch the fireworks. The only thing they hadn’t calculated was that I would overhear the truth. My phone vibrated in my palm. Laurie was calling from an unknown number. The moment I picked up, her voice came through. “Unblock me.” In the background, I could hear the howling arctic wind. And Simon’s voice. “Laurie, come quick. The sky is lighting up.” Laurie covered the receiver, her voice turning distant for a second before returning, calm as ever. “The safety emergency was real. After I resolved it, I just happened to join him on the trip.” “A detour from Boston all the way to Iceland?” Silence hung on the other end for two full seconds. “Sean, stop twisting my words.” “I’m not twisting anything. I’ve let it go.” “I saw your text,” her tone turned cold. “It’s fine if you’re disappointed or angry, but don’t test me with breakups.” Jasper immediately chimed in. “Sean, just let her stay with Simon until his treatment session is over. We can talk when she gets back.” Sam added from the side, “If Laurie actually still liked Simon, would you even have had a chance with her for the past five years?” That sentence pierced my eardrums like a needle. Laurie must have heard it too, because her voice softened slightly. “I’ll be back in three days. The launch for the Boreal System is that same day. Make sure you finalize the presentation slides.” The Boreal System was an early warning risk control software I had spent four years building. During the hardest stretch, I slept in the office for three straight months. Laurie had once placed an aurora snow globe on my desk, promising that when the system officially launched, she would take me to see the real Northern Lights. Now, as the system was about to be released, she had gone to see them with someone else first. “Laurie, we’re broken up.” She let out a soft sigh. “You’re just speaking out of anger. Sean, don’t make me deal with your emotions when I get back.” The line went dead. Sam rubbed his nose and reached out to pull me. “Alright, Laurie explained everything. Let’s go, the fireworks are starting.” I dodged his hand and took a cab home alone. In the entryway sat the custom watch Laurie had given me two months ago. Underneath the box was an Iceland travel brochure. I used to think it was a subtle hint at a proposal. Now I realized it was just a page dropped from Simon’s itinerary. The computer in the study was still on. Laurie’s corporate account hadn’t logged out, and an itinerary confirmation email was centered on the screen. The flight was booked two weeks ago. The hotel was an aurora view suite. The guests listed were Laurie and Simon. The so-called emergency was a lie prepared for me from the start. Just as I was about to close the tab, a new email popped up. The sender was Jasper. Subject: PR Contingency Plan Regarding Mr. Sean’s Exit from the Boreal Project. Sent three days ago. I opened the attachment. The very first line read: If Sean discovers the Iceland trip, his brother, Sam, will handle comforting him, while Jasper delays him. And on the last page, there were two words personally approved by Laurie: Approved. The next morning, Laurie sent her assistant over with a necklace. The assistant placed the velvet box on the table with a smile. “Ms. Gosling said this is an anniversary gift. She hopes you can cool off and join the launch rehearsal on time this afternoon.” The pendant was a silver snowflake. Identical to the one I received on my birthday three years ago. I flipped over the bottom of the box and saw the duty-free receipt. Location: Iceland Airport. Quantity: Two. I pushed the box back across the table. “Thank her for me, but please tell her to give this to someone more suitable.” The assistant looked awkward. “Mr. Sean, Ms. Gosling also said that the Boreal project is at a critical stage. It’s best not to bring personal feelings into work.” I raised my eyes. “Take a message back to her for me too: Don’t use other people’s hard work to please her ex.” That afternoon, I went to the company headquarters. A massive poster hung by the entrance of the launch hall. Laurie’s name was at the top, and Simon stood right beside her, labeled as the Creative Founder of the Boreal System. My name was completely gone. Jasper was directing the staff to swap seat tags. When he saw me, he immediately dragged me aside. “Why are you here early?” “If I didn’t come early, how would I know someone else is sitting in my seat?” He lowered his voice. “This is just a marketing strategy. Simon is an avalanche survivor. Using his story gives the media a narrative they actually want to cover.” “So you erased my name.” “Ms. Gosling said that true achievers don’t need to obsess over credit.” I stared at the man who had been my friend for twelve years. When he was maliciously fired by his previous employer, I brought him into Laurie’s company and begged her to make him the PR Director. The first time he received a bonus, he hugged me crying, swearing he would never let me down. Now, he was using the crisis management skills I taught him to manage me. The giant screen suddenly lit up. Laurie joined the video conference remotely from Iceland. She wore a black parka, with a snow-covered wooden cabin behind her. Simon was wrapped in her scarf, sitting by the fireplace. “Let’s start the rehearsal,” she said. I stepped in front of the camera lens. “Who approved that poster?” When Laurie saw me, her brows furrowed. “Simon’s story has more marketing value. After the press conference, I will credit your contributions in an internal memo.” “I don’t want an internal memo.” Simon rose from the sofa and interrupted softly. “Sean, don’t blame Laurie. I just felt a personal connection to the name Boreal, so I agreed to help promote it.” He raised his hand to adjust his scarf, revealing a woven cord on his wrist. I had woven that cord for Laurie myself. Embedded in the knot was an old microchip, the processor that burned out during the very first successful test run of the Boreal System. Laurie had said it was proof of what we endured together. I asked, “Where did you get the item on your wrist?” Simon subconsciously glanced at Laurie. Laurie said indifferently, “It’s just an old cord. He liked it, so he took it.” “That’s mine.” “Sean,” her tone grew sharp. “Don’t make a scene in front of the employees.” Whispers erupted among the staff below. Sam arrived out of nowhere and gestured to me from the front row. “Sean, come down first. Simon is just borrowing it. There’s no need to throw a fit over something so trivial.” I didn’t move an inch. “The core architecture of the Boreal System belongs to me. As of today, I am revoking the authorization.” The hall fell dead silent. Laurie’s gaze darkened. “All your development was completed at the company. The intellectual property belongs to the firm.” “The initial version was written before I ever joined this company. The original source code and copyright registrations are all under my personal name.” Jasper’s face drained of color. Sam rushed onto the stage and grabbed my arm. “Are you insane, Sean? The company invested tens of millions into this project. Revoking authorization now, are you trying to force Laurie to fly back just to soothe your ego?” I pulled my arm free. “I’m simply taking back what belongs to me.” Laurie stared at me through the screen for a moment, then let out a cold laugh. “You won’t do it.” “What?” “You spent four years pouring your soul into Boreal. It’s like your child. You won’t actually destroy it.” She was so certain. Certain that I couldn’t let go of the project, and certain that I couldn’t let go of her. “Continue the rehearsal,” Laurie instructed her assistant. “Temporarily suspend Sean’s backend access. We’ll restore it once he cools down.” The screen went dark. Security guards walked up to me and politely asked me to leave. As the elevator doors were closing, I saw two staff members carrying cardboard boxes out of the R&D department. Inside the boxes were my original handwritten calculation manuscripts. Stuck on top was an international shipping label. Destination: The wooden cabin in Iceland where Laurie and Simon were staying. I intercepted the two boxes. The assistant stepped in front of me. “Mr. Sean, this is Ms. Gosling’s arrangement.” “These manuscripts are my personal property.” “Ms. Gosling said Mr. Simon needs to understand the development process for his interview tomorrow.” I tore off the shipping label and hugged the manuscripts to my chest. “If he wants to tell a story, let him tell his own.” The assistant tried to stop me again, but Sam charged out of the elevator and yanked the boxes out of my hands. “Sean, stop throwing a tantrum!” His movement was too violent. The bottom of the box ripped open, sending hundreds of pages of manuscripts scattering across the floor. A passing employee dropped a cup of coffee, spilling brown liquid right onto the oldest stack of calculation sheets. I knelt down to pick them up. The edges of the paper were soaked through, crumbling at the slightest touch. Those were the very last data sets my father had helped me check before he passed away. He didn’t understand programming, so he wore his reading glasses, checking every single number line by line. Sam caught sight of the handwriting on the paper, and his expression froze. “They’re just a few draft pages. Everything is backed up on the cloud anyway.” I looked up at him. “This is Dad’s handwriting.” His lips twitched, but he quickly averted his eyes. “If Dad were still alive, he wouldn’t want to see you ruin Laurie’s company either.” Jasper knelt down to help me gather the papers, whispering, “Sean, once the Boreal launch succeeds, Laurie is giving you a five percent profit share. If you cooperate now, everyone wins.” “You all knew she was giving the creator credit to Simon, didn’t you?” His hands stopped. I asked again, “Iceland, the itinerary, the project, what else have you been keeping from me?” Sam answered impatiently, “Laurie just owes Simon an closure. They broke up back then because Simon went on a mountain survey for her and got caught in an avalanche.” “And?” “And so Boreal was originally something Laurie wanted to build for him!” Sam glared at me. “You were just the engineer who executed her vision.” Four years of development. Over fourteen hundred sleepless nights. In my brother’s mouth, it all boiled down to being the engineer who executed her vision. I picked up the dry manuscripts and turned to walk away. Laurie’s video call came through to the assistant’s phone. “Put him on.” The assistant handed the phone over. It was late at night in Iceland. Simon was asleep, resting his head on Laurie’s shoulder. She didn’t push him away, only kept her voice hushed. “Simon has an interview tomorrow morning. Hand over the manuscripts.” “No.” “Sean, stop being unreasonable.” “Laurie, do you have any idea that my father’s final notes are on these papers?” She went quiet for a moment. “I’ll hire an expert to restore them.” “Some things can’t be restored.” “Then rewrite them,” her voice carried a hint of exhaustion. “You’re a professional engineer. There’s no need to make things hard for a recovering patient over a few old sheets of paper.” Jasper reminded her from the side, “Ms. Gosling, the media already knows Simon is the project founder. If we don’t have the original manuscripts, the interview will fall apart.” Laurie didn’t hesitate. “Take the manuscripts.” The assistant took a step forward. As I backed away, my spine hit the wall, and the papers slipped from my arms again. Sam took the chance to grab the box, while Jasper blocked my path. Jasper whispered, “Once the launch is over, I’ll personally help you get them back.” “What makes you think you have the right to get anything back for me?” Jasper avoided my eyes. Over the phone speaker, Laurie settled the matter as effortlessly as she always did. “After the project concludes, I’ll stay at the family estate with you for a few days, and we’ll restore your father’s study to exactly how it was.” “What happened to the family estate?” The surrounding air instantly went still. Sam’s face turned ghostly pale. I glared at him. “What did you do to the estate?” “The company was short on cash flow last year, so Laurie used the house as collateral for a loan,” he stammered out. “It was just for temporary liquidity.” That house was the only legacy our father left us. Ownership was split fifty-fifty between us. My signature had never appeared on a single mortgage document. “Who signed my name?” Sam clutched the box tighter. “Sean, Laurie promised to buy me a new apartment. I just thought the old house was sitting empty anyway.” “I asked you, who signed my name?” His eyes turned red as he snapped back, “I forged your signature! But Laurie promised that once Boreal succeeds, the loan will be paid off immediately!” Laurie didn’t deny it. She remained composed on the call. “Sean, I will explain everything when I return. Sign the authorization extension right now, otherwise the bank will recall the loan early, and the estate will be repossessed.” The assistant conveniently handed over a pen and the legal document. The signature flag was already attached to the final page. I looked at my brother, looked at my best friend, and looked at the woman on the screen who had once promised to protect everything I cherished. Then, I took the pen. Laurie’s tense brows finally relaxed. What she failed to notice was that in the authorization duration column, I didn’t write Permanent. I wrote 72 Hours. Laurie didn’t contact me the day she landed. Instead, photos from the airport trending online took over the news. In the shots, she was pushing Simon’s luggage with one hand while keeping her other hand around his waist. They were both wearing matching red cords on their wrists. The caption read: A Decade-Long Aurora Promise Kept. Jasper called me, urging me to get to the office. “The media found out about your relationship with Laurie. Everyone is saying Simon is a homewrecker. You need to clarify things publicly.” “Clarify what?” “Say that you two broke up amicably a long time ago, and that her Iceland trip has nothing to do with you.” I hung up the phone. Half an hour later, Sam arrived at my apartment with two security guards. “Sean, Laurie is waiting at the estate. The bank reps are there too. If you don’t sign the permanent authorization today, the house gets seized.” I went with him. The gates to the ancestral estate were wide open. The pomegranate tree my father planted was uprooted and dumped by the courtyard wall. The antique furniture in the living room had been completely cleared out. Simon stood in the center holding a roll of architectural blueprints, chatting cheerfully with Laurie. “Let’s convert the study into a nursery. It’ll be convenient when we have kids after we get married.” I stopped at the doorway. Laurie caught sight of me, her expression faltering slightly. “He was just talking casually.” “This is my home.” The smile on Simon’s face faded. Sam hastily jumped in, “Sean, Laurie bought out your share of the title. If you marry her later, this will still be your home. Simon is just helping look at the renovation plans.” I walked over to the uprooted pomegranate tree and touched the jagged tally marks on its trunk. My father had carved those marks to measure mine and Sam’s height when we were kids. The axe cut sat right on top of the very last mark my father had made. Laurie walked up behind me. “The roots were rotten, which posed a safety hazard. I’ll have someone plant a new one.” “Where are my manuscripts?” She retrieved the box from her car. The top few pages had already been cut out and placed inside Simon’s media interview binder. Beside my father’s handwriting was Simon’s flourish signature. “The press required physical proof,” Laurie said smoothly. “I’ll return them after the launch.” I reached out and pulled those pages out of the binder. Simon reached over to stop me, and his sleeve caught the aurora snow globe sitting on the edge of the table. The glass shattered on the hard tile floor. Green glitter mixed with liquid spilled across the stone. When Laurie gave it to me, she had recorded a voice message in the base. When Boreal succeeds, we’ll get married. Now, the base was cracked in two, the recorded voice looping erratically: “We will… We will…” Simon turned pale with fright. “I’m so sorry, Sean, I didn’t mean to!” Laurie immediately shielded him behind her back, ordering her assistant to clean it up. I knelt down to pick up the broken base. She gripped my wrist tight. “There’s broken glass. Don’t touch it.” “Let go.” “It’s just an old trinket. I’ll buy you a brand-new one.” I looked up at her, a question slipping out. “Laurie, when you pursued me back then, was it because of him too?” She didn’t catch my meaning. But Simon’s face changed instantly. I pulled an old sheet from his interview binder. It was a wishlist written ten years ago: Watch the Northern Lights. Build a risk warning system. Propose under the pomegranate tree. Signed ten years ago by Simon. Every single thing I had ever done with Laurie was nothing more than an item checked off Simon’s old bucket list. Jasper hurried in. Seeing the list in my hand, he immediately said, “Why bring up ancient history? The fact that Laurie did all those things with you later proves she chose you!” Simon’s eyes welled with tears. “Laurie was just missing me too much back then, so she found someone with a similar personality to keep her company. But she wasn’t bad to you either, Sean. Please don’t force her to admit it.” I looked at Laurie. This was the final chance I was giving her. “Is what he said true?” Laurie offered no answer. She simply placed a legal statement in front of me. “The launch is about to start. Sign this first.” In the statement, I was to admit that I had never participated in the core development of Boreal, and that I apologized to Simon for maliciously attempting to claim ownership. Further down was an incident liability confirmation. During their time in Iceland, Simon had remotely altered the testing parameters, nearly causing the partner company’s hardware to overload. They wanted me to take full responsibility for the malfunction. Sam coaxed me softly, “Sean, Simon has a medical condition, he can’t handle an investigation. You’re a professional engineer, at worst you’ll just face a temporary suspension.” Jasper added, “Once the statement is released, the public outrage will settle down. You’ve loved Laurie for five years, you can’t really stand by and watch her company fail its IPO, right?” Laurie handed me the pen. “Sean, sign it. I will settle the estate loan immediately. Once this passes, we will get married as planned.” I didn’t take it. She took my hand and forced the pen into my palm. “Don’t act out of spite. I know you won’t leave.” At that exact moment, the pain ran so deep that there were no tears left to shed. I signed my name at the bottom of the statement, pulled out another document from under it, and handed them both over to her. Laurie only glanced at the signature before instructing her assistant to release it to the press. She failed to notice that the second document was not an authorization extension. The second the statement went live online, the main screen in the launch hall went black. Laurie’s phone blasted a piercing system alarm. Her assistant rushed in, face pale as a sheet. “Ms. Gosling! The Boreal System authorization just expired!”

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I finally pulled a secret chaser figure from a mystery box, beaming as I proudly displayed it on my husband’s desk. He glanced at it for a fraction of a second, then tossed it right into the trash can. “You’re twenty-six years old. Isn’t playing with this stuff a little childish?” Swallowing my hurt, I retrieved the figure and listed it on a local reselling app. Almost immediately, a buyer from nearby snapped it up. She mentioned she lived close and asked if I could deliver it in person. The moment I stepped into her home, I froze at the entryway. An entire wall of display cabinets stretched across the room, packed with insanely expensive, limited-edition figures. The hostess gave me a warm smile. “My younger boyfriend bought all of these for me. I told him I’m in my thirties and playing with toys makes me look silly, but he insists that in his eyes, I’ll always be a girl.” Just then, the front door clicked open. A man walked in holding two iced beverages, leaning down to plant a soft kiss on her cheek. I stepped aside, but as my eyes caught his profile in my peripheral vision, the blood in my veins turned to ice. This man, who spent fortunes collecting rare figures and treated her like a queen, was the exact same husband who had called me childish and thrown away my secret chaser just yesterday. Joey. 1 Our eyes locked, and the color drained from his face instantly. “Joey, you’re staring at her. Don’t scare the poor girl,” Stella said playfully, wrapping her arm around his. She handed me one of the drinks. “She’s the girl who sold me the secret chaser figure. Her name is Gemma. You two should introduce yourselves.” Joey regained his composure, giving me a curt nod. “Hello.” He turned straight back to Stella, his voice dripping with unbearable tenderness. “You don’t need to buy secondhand stuff anymore. Whatever you want, I’ll buy it brand new for you.” Stella swayed his arm gently. “Secondhand is fine. Otherwise, my heart aches seeing you wait in line for hours every time a limited edition drops.” I dug my nails into my palms until they nearly drew blood, yet I felt no pain at all. Stella had bragged that the figures on the wall were rare collectibles gathered from all over the world. One particular figure made my eyes sting. It was an overseas exclusive released a year ago that I had coveted for months. Joey had been on a business trip to that country back then. I hadn’t even dared to ask for the whole figure, only begging him to bring back a matching commemorative sticker. He had frowned and snapped at me at the time, telling me he had a mountain of work to do and no time for useless garbage. It turned out he wasn’t short on time. He just refused to spare a single shred of patience for me. Yet for Stella, he was more than willing to queue up all day for an entire exclusive figure. “Oh, Gemma, I have a duplicate figure I’d love to gift you,” Stella suddenly offered. “Let me grab it from the bedroom.” The moment she turned the corner, Joey stepped forward, grabbing my arm and pulling me into the shadow of the entryway. “Go home first,” he hissed in a low whisper. “I’ll explain everything when I get back.” My voice rasped with bitter humor. “Explain what? Explain that you’re hiding a mistress and cheating on your wife?” Panic flashed across his eyes. He shoved me toward the door, slamming it shut with a loud bang. My wrist throbbed with a burning pain, and tears streamed down uncontrollably. Through the thin wood of the door, muffled voices drifted out. “Oh? Why did Gemma leave? I didn’t get to give her the gift.” “I just let her go. She’s just a stranger selling secondhand toys, there’s no need to get close to her.” Then came the sound of wet, affectionate kissing. I leaned against the hallway wall, my stomach churning with pure nausea. Suddenly, a realization struck me like a lightning bolt. My period was a month late. I stumbled back to my apartment, tore open a pregnancy test, and waited. Two bold red lines appeared. I was pregnant. Before I could digest the news, the lock clicked. Joey was home. In a rush, I wrapped the test in paper and threw it into the trash. He walked in, catching sight of my deathly pale face, and his brows furrowed. “Why do you look so sick? Are you feeling unwell?” He reached out to touch my forehead, but I pulled away coldly. He withdrew his hand, letting out a heavy sigh. “What happened earlier wasn’t what you think. Stella is the older girl from next door where I grew up. When I was young and my family struggled to eat, her family helped us out. She has a congenital heart condition. Before her mother passed away, she begged me to look after her. I only agreed to pretend to be her boyfriend so she could recover in peace.” “So you cheated on your wife and bought her an entire wall of limited edition figures?” My chest felt as though a crushing weight had settled on it, making it hard to breathe. “Joey, I just realized you have a whole second home out there.” “And she’s eight years older than you!” My voice rose uncontrollably, my whole body shaking. “You called my hobby childish, but you flew across the world to build a wall of toys for her!” Guilt flickered in Joey’s eyes, and his tone softened slightly. “Fine, I already thought those toys were silly anyway. If you like them, I’ll buy them for you from now on. I’ll handle Stella properly. Her heart is weak and she can’t take stress, so don’t go making a scene.” I stared at this man I had loved for six years, feeling an overwhelming sense of strangerhood. “Joey, let’s get a divorce.” He dismissed it as a temper tantrum, a sneer tugging at his lips. “Stop dramatic. I’m just taking care of her. It’s not like I don’t love you. You’re the one who holds the marriage certificate with me.” “Besides, you can’t live without me. Don’t ever mention divorce again. I’m taking Stella to the movies now. Stay home and stop being unreasonable.” The door clicked shut gently. Six years of dating, three years of marriage. I had given him my heart and soul, only to be told not to trouble his mistress. Before I could process the pain, a message popped up from Stella. I’m so sorry, sweetie. My boyfriend has a quick temper and couldn’t host you properly. I saved a figure for you, drop by whenever you’re free to pick it up. I clicked into her social media profile and scrolled through years of posts, every single one revolving around Joey. My dream figure was completely out of print, so Joey contacted the manufacturer directly to custom-make a set for me. Birthday surprise: a huge box of mystery figures! He canceled an important business meeting just to line up for them. Love my younger boy so much! I casually mentioned a celebrity figure, and he delivered it to my hands the next morning. My boy always keeps his promises. Every photo hid subtle traces of Joey. Back when I drank until I threw up at business dinners just to help him secure clients, all I asked for in return was one afternoon accompanying me to a toy shop. Yet he turned around and grabbed every new release for Stella at the first opportunity. By the time I reached the bottom of her feed, the sharp sting in my chest had numbed into complete emptiness. I replied with a short text. No thanks. I don’t want it anymore. I didn’t care about the figures, and I didn’t want Joey anymore either. I contacted a divorce attorney immediately, sending over all the evidence of his infidelity. That wall of figures was purchased with marital assets after our wedding, and in court, I wouldn’t yield a single cent. That night, Joey returned home holding a newly released box set of figures, holding it out to me. “Look, isn’t this the series you wanted before?” I didn’t look up, folding my clothes neatly. “Return it. I don’t want it.” The smile on his face vanished, replaced by annoyance. “You cried begging me for it before. Now that I bought it, you’re pushing it away. Stop looking for trouble.” “I really don’t want it,” I repeated calmly. “What you owe me was never just a toy set.” He lost his temper completely. “Gemma, are you ever going to drop this!” Right then, his phone rang. In his rush, he accidentally hit the speakerphone button, and Stella’s tearful voice echoed loudly. “Joey, my heart hurts so much… my chest feels so tight…” Joey’s face paled. He bolted toward the door, his arm swinging wildly as he stood up, shoving me hard onto the floor. My lower back slammed against the sharp corner of the table, causing me to gasp in agony. In the next second, a searing, excruciating pain flared up in my lower abdomen. “Joey!” I grabbed his sleeve tightly, eyes red. “My stomach hurts so bad, please take me to the hospital, I’m begging you…” He yanked his arm free in frustration. “Enough! Stop using fake pain to compete for attention! This is a matter of life and death for her!” He walked out without looking back once. The pain worsened, and warm blood trickled down my legs. I forced myself to dial emergency services, and an ambulance rushed me to the hospital. Because of that blow, I suffered a miscarriage. Lying in the hospital bed, my eyes remained dry, unable to squeeze out a single tear. While the procedure tormented me, Stella updated her social media. The photo showed her snuggled in Joey’s arms, his hand resting gently over her chest. The caption read: Joey was terrified! Honestly my heart didn’t even hurt that much, I just wanted to trick him into staying longer, teehee. Hidden from him! Seeing those words, the emotional dam broke, and I sobbed uncontrollably. I had prayed for this child for three years. Gone, all because of a single lie. Soon after, another message from Stella popped up. Gemma, let’s meet up. You really need to take this figure, or I’ll feel too guilty. My fingers hovered over the screen before typing a response. Okay. Good. It was time to lay everything out in the open. The next day, as I reached the entrance of the cafe, Stella rushed toward me and slapped me hard across the face. A loud crack echoed through the air. “Gemma, do you have no shame?” Stella’s eyes were red, her voice trembling. “I treated you like a friend, and you tried to seduce my boyfriend behind my back!” I covered my burning cheek, my ears ringing. She shoved her phone in front of my face, showing a photo taken a month ago of Joey and me holding hands in the park. “I went through your social media and realized you two were together all along! Selling me that figure and coming to my house was just a deliberate act to brag and trigger me, wasn’t it?” Her voice rose into a dramatic sob, her hand clutching her chest as her knees buckled toward the ground. “I’m begging you! My heart is weak, I can’t live without Joey! Please let us go, I’ll give you my entire wall of figures!” Bystanders gathered, pointing fingers while phone cameras aimed straight at me. “How shameless! Being a side chick and picking on a sick woman!” I took a deep breath, raised my hand, and slapped Stella right back across the face. “Your boyfriend?” My voice trembled as I pulled our marriage certificate from my bag. “Joey and I registered three years ago. We are legally married.” “As for that wall of figures, it was bought with marital assets. My lawyer has prepared the paperwork, and I will reclaim every single cent.” The crowd fell silent for a moment. “They have a marriage certificate?” “So the sick woman is the mistress?” Stella swayed, her eyes welling up with tears. “Impossible… Joey told me he wasn’t married…” Before she could finish, a heavy force shoved me back. “Gemma!” Joey rushed forward, wrapping Stella securely in his arms, his eyes filled with rage as he glared at me. “Who gave you permission to hit her? You know her heart is bad!” Stella leaned against him, clutching her chest as she whimpered. “Joey, tell me, are you really married? Am I… am I the mistress?” Joey hesitated for only a second. “No.” “She has delusions. This marriage certificate is a forgery. She’s just a crazy woman who has been stalking me.” Those words pinned me to the spot like ice. “Joey, have you lost your mind? We are legally…” His expression turned completely cold as he grabbed Stella’s wrist. “Stella, slap her back.” I stared at him in disbelief, hearing only his frozen voice. “She hurt you just now. Hit her back. I will never let anyone bully my girlfriend.” That gave Stella all the confidence she needed. SLAP! Another heavy strike landed on my other cheek. Stella bit her lip. “That’s what you get for lying and playing the homewrecker.” She looked at Joey, feigning worry. “But… where did she get such a realistic marriage certificate? Forgery is illegal, shouldn’t we call the police?” A flicker of reluctance crossed Joey’s eyes, but in the next second, he snatched the marriage certificate from my hand and tore it to shreds! The scraps fell to the ground like drops of blood. On the day we registered, he had held that certificate in his hands, kissing it over and over. Gemma, you’re finally my legal wife! In just three short years, for another woman, he tore apart our marriage with his own hands. “It’s just a fake document anyway. Let’s see how you spread rumors now,” he said, his voice raspy and final.

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