Category: English

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 I was right in the middle of a high-level executive board meeting when I got the call. My husband, Garry, had fallen from the thirteenth floor while filming a stunt on set. I abandoned everything and rushed home in an absolute panic, only to find him and his entire entourage perfectly fine, drinking and singing karaoke in our living room. Garry shot me a sideways glance, his tone dripping with sheer annoyance. “I told you to come home last night, and you refused. What the hell are you doing here now?” “Why didn’t you just die outside?” Before I could even process his venom, that sickeningly familiar inner voice echoed in my head. Hmph. I knew my wife still loves me. The second she heard I was hurt, she came running back. Hurry up, babe. Come jump into my arms and act spoiled like you always do. Tell me you love me and that you can’t live without me. I looked down at the blood seeping through my sleeve, an injury from a minor car accident I got into because I was driving so fast to get to him. For the first time in ten years, I did not cater to the secret desires in his head. Instead, I slowly reached into my bag, pulled out a thick envelope, and placed it on the table. “Since you hate me that much, let’s get a divorce.” … Garry’s brow furrowed tightly. He stared at me like his brain hadn’t quite processed the words. Sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, his entourage immediately scrambled to do damage control. “Sister-in-law, you must be exhausted from work. You are just talking crazy.” “Yeah, Scarlett, Garry was just joking. Don’t take it seriously.” They probably assumed I was just throwing a tantrum to get Garry’s attention. I couldn’t blame them for thinking that. After all, for the ten years I had been with Garry, I had acted like his perfect, completely obedient marionette. If Garry told me to go east, I would never dare step west. Because I could hear his true inner voice, I always treated his violent outbursts and cruel words as a twisted form of affection. I broke my own back trying to be perfect for him. But today, I was done being a puppet on a string. “You are right. I am exhausted,” I said, my voice completely devoid of emotion as I looked directly at the man sitting in the center of the couch. “So, Garry, let’s get a divorce.” The moment Garry realized I wasn’t joking, the glass tumbler in his hand shattered under the sudden pressure of his grip. He let out a cold, mocking scoff. “Scarlett, do you really think you are that important?” “A divorce? I have been waiting for this day.” “If you hadn’t begged me to marry you back then, I wouldn’t have even looked at you!” His spoken words were vicious and biting. But beneath them, his inner voice was a pathetic, frantic prayer. What is wrong with my wife? Why does she suddenly want a divorce? Do you not love me anymore?! No, no, no! Please, babe, take it back! Tell me you don’t want to leave me! I want to be with you forever! This was the incredibly toxic duality I had lived with for ten years. Garry suffered from severe paranoid personality disorder. The less he cared about someone, the kinder and more patient he was to them. But to the person he supposedly loved? He held impossibly high expectations. The second I failed to meet whatever ridiculous standard he set in his head, he would express his dissatisfaction by screaming, throwing things, and being completely vile. When I first started hearing his inner voice, I was foolishly moved by it. I thought he was just a broken man who couldn’t express his love. From that point on, whenever we fought, Garry didn’t have to do a single thing to fix it. All I had to do was listen to his cheap, pathetic inner monologue, and I would instantly forgive him and coax myself back into his arms. Over the years, I tried desperately to teach him how to verbally express his affection. But he always pushed me away with deep annoyance, only to scream internally right after. Babe, babe, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to push you! Hurry up and hug me! Why aren’t you coming over?! Come kiss me right now so we can make up! When Garry’s assistant accidentally fell asleep during a massive promotional live stream, causing a catastrophic PR disaster, Garry didn’t say a single harsh word to her. He just smiled and gave her a month of paid leave. But when I didn’t hear him call my name from the other room, he handcuffed my wrist to the headboard and locked me in the bedroom for three days. When his assistant mixed up wardrobe shipments and cost him three million dollars in breach of contract fees, he patted her on the head and told her it was fine. But when my mother was diagnosed with a critical illness and I desperately needed thirty grand for her emergency surgery, he completely ignored my pleas all because I had forgotten to kiss him before leaving the house that morning. Because the surgery was delayed, my mother would never be able to get out of bed again. Garry, this time, I am no longer cleaning up the mess of your hypocrisy. Ignoring the judgmental stares of everyone in the room, I calmly pushed the divorce papers across the table. “Sign it. I will see you at the courthouse tomorrow at 10 AM.” Garry stared at my elegant, resolute signature on the document. The corner of his eye twitched violently. Why did she even prepare something like this? She is just trying to get my attention, right? That has to be it. Be a good girl, babe, stop throwing a fit. You know my heart belongs entirely to you. Just come hug me. You haven’t slept in the same bed as me for two days. I am going to kiss you to death tonight. The voices assaulted my mind from all directions, suffocating me. Right at that moment, his assistant, Chloe, peeked her head out from behind Garry’s shoulder. “Scarlett, his manager said a lot of crazy fans have been forging his signature lately.” “If you want Garry to sign anything, you need to sign a strict NDA first, and we have to record the entire process on video.” Garry clenched his fists, leaning back into the couch as he spoke with absolute ruthlessness. “Scarlett, if you walk out that door today, you are not taking a single thing that belongs to me.” “That includes the clothes on your back. Take them off.” Good girl, this is so insulting! Hurry up and refuse! I am giving you the perfect excuse to back down! If I didn’t just want you to come home, I wouldn’t have even let these losers in our house. I want to kick them all out. I just want to cuddle with my wife. I had known Garry for ten years. We dated for eight, and we had been married for six. He had an extreme, suffocating need for control. Where I worked, who I interacted with every day, the very clothes I wore everything had to be meticulously curated by him. If I didn’t let him control those things, it meant I didn’t love him. My entire closet consisted solely of clothes he had bought. Even my underwear. In the past, I actually thought this was his twisted way of proving his love. Now? It was just humiliating evidence that after ten years, I owned absolutely nothing of my own. Looking at Garry’s smug, triumphant expression, I slowly exhaled. “Fine. I will sign.” A flash of malicious victory crossed Chloe’s face as she quickly scrambled to prepare the NDA forms. Garry stared at me, completely unable to mask his absolute shock. I offered him a polite, hollow smile. “Don’t worry. I won’t take a single thing that belongs to you.” The room fell dead silent. Everyone exchanged nervous glances, but no one dared to speak. I walked into our massive walk-in closet, dug through the storage boxes in the back, and finally found the cheap puffer jacket and denim shorts I had bought for myself ten years ago. As I was changing, Garry’s frantic inner voice bled through the walls. What is she doing?! Is she actually divorcing me?! No! I don’t want a home without my wife! If she leaves, I’ll die! I’ll literally die! The softest corner of my heart trembled slightly, but I did not stop moving. When I pushed open the bedroom door, Garry was sitting on the edge of the bed, aggressively puffing on a cigarette. Seeing me, he instinctively crushed it out in the ashtray. When his eyes finally landed on my old, faded clothes, he completely lost his composure. His inner voice started blaring like a broken smoke alarm. Why did she actually change out of the clothes I bought her?! I promise I’ll never make a joke like this again! Babe, please don’t take it seriously! It is nearly a hundred degrees outside! If she wears a puffer jacket, she’s going to get heatstroke! I ignored the pathetic whining in his head. I dropped his expensive clothes onto the bed in front of him and turned toward the stairs. “Scarlett, are you absolutely sure you want to do this?” Garry’s voice was dark and menacing from behind me. I didn’t turn around. “I thought I made myself perfectly clear downstairs.” Just as I took my first step, Garry spoke again. “If you walk out today, tomorrow morning, I will hand your Generation II AI Robotics blueprints over to Maya and have her patent it under her name.” Despite the blistering summer heat outside, I felt like I had been plunged into arctic waters. Every drop of blood in my body ran cold. Babe, I’m sorry! I just don’t know what else to do! I can’t let you leave me! You care about this project more than anything. If I use it as leverage, you won’t leave, right? Right?! The Generation II Robotics project was a highly specialized emotional-support AI I had designed specifically for people with paranoid personality disorders like Garry. The core philosophy was simple: to let people like him know they weren’t alone in the world, and that there were people who loved them. The woman he mentioned Maya had blatantly stolen my prototype during a global robotics competition right after I graduated college. Before I could even gather the evidence to expose her, she filed a formal complaint with the judging panel, completely reversing the narrative and accusing me of plagiarizing her. During that horrific period, I fell into a deep, crippling depression and was medically diagnosed. And now, all of that trauma had become nothing more than leverage for Garry to control me. It was a shame. Because Garry, this time, I am not backing down. Garry cared about his pride more than his life. With his entire entourage watching, there was no way he could refuse to sign the divorce papers without looking weak. Sure enough, when I walked downstairs, the signed agreement was sitting on the coffee table. The moment the ink was dry, Garry had ordered everyone out of the house. Except for his precious assistant, Chloe. Under the cold, mechanical lens of a professional video camera, I signed the NDA. Chloe held the signed document, her eyes gleaming with barely concealed excitement. Garry sat in the darkest corner of the sectional sofa, completely silent. After living in this massive mansion for years, the only things I owned didn’t even fill half of a cheap canvas tote bag. As I grabbed my bag and reached for the front door, Garry’s inner voice echoed one last time. Babe, you don’t actually think you can escape me, do you? The next second, a suffocating, violent force crashed over me like a hurricane. His voice was the last thing ringing in my ears. Babe, you promised you would love me forever. Why are you running away so fast? Babe… I am a coward. But I love you. You cannot leave me. When I opened my eyes again, I was back in the master bedroom. And exactly as I expected, my wrist was heavily handcuffed to the steel frame of the bed. Chloe walked into the room, holding a steaming bowl of congee. “Oh, you’re awake, Scarlett. Drink this.” I stared at her with dead eyes and didn’t move. Without warning, she violently grabbed my jaw, forcing my mouth open, and shoved the edge of the bowl against my lips. Boiling hot congee spilled down my chin and seeped under my collar. I broke out in a cold sweat from the agonizing burn and forcefully shoved her away. Chloe lazily brushed off her clothes, flashing her usual punchable smirk. “Don’t give me that look, Scarlett. This was Garry’s explicit order. There is no need to make things difficult for me.” “He said if you refused to cooperate, I have full permission to use physical force to make you behave.” I swallowed the raging fury in my throat, grinding the words out through clenched teeth. “Get out. Tell Garry to come see me himself.” Hearing that, Chloe reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring of keys. “Garry left on a business trip. He won’t be back for a week.” “I’ll be taking very good care of you while he’s gone.” I stared at the keys in her hand, my mind going completely blank for a second. Hanging from the ring was a small, woven tassel charm. Garry and I had made it together with our own hands. The night we finished it, he sat on the edge of the bed holding the keys, grinning like an absolute idiot for an hour. I made this with my wife. No one else is ever allowed to touch it. I really want to fire all the maids. I just want this house to be empty, so it’s only me and my wife. No one is allowed to even look at her. But now? Not only had he invited countless strangers into our private sanctuary, he had handed the keys to our home to another woman. Noticing my reaction, Chloe dangled the keys in front of my face like she was teasing a dog. “Surprised? I told Garry I liked this keychain, and he just gave it to me.” “Honestly, I don’t even need the keys. My fingerprint is already registered on every single digital lock in the house.” “But this charm is incredibly ugly.” She unhooked the woven tassel and casually tossed it out the open window. The small glass pendant attached to it slammed against the pavement outside, shattering into dozens of pieces. Just like Garry and me. I refused to look at her anymore. I turned my head and closed my eyes. Chloe leaned down, whispering directly into my ear like a venomous snake. “Scarlett, your mother is lying in a hospital bed wishing she was dead. How do you have the peace of mind to sleep?” My eyes snapped open. I instantly grabbed her by the collar of her shirt. “What did you just say?” “What happened to my mother?!” Chloe threw her hands up, feigning complete innocence. She pulled out her phone and showed me a call log a conversation she had with my mother’s attending physician thirty minutes ago. “They’ve issued three critical condition notices today. You really are a devoted daughter, aren’t you?” The moment I verified the information, I didn’t even put on my shoes. I bolted for the door and sprinted down the stairs. But when I reached the grand entrance, the heavy reinforced door was completely locked down. It wouldn’t budge. Chloe sauntered down the stairs at a leisurely pace. “It isn’t that I don’t want you to see your mother for the last time.” “Garry made it very clear. Until he gets back, you are not allowed to take a single step outside this house.” I ignored her completely. All I knew was that my mother didn’t have time to wait. My phone and all my electronics had already been confiscated. I had to figure this out myself. I knew the internal security schematics of this house. Garry had designed it himself. In the event of a lockdown, the doors would magnetically seal from the inside. They could only be bypassed by emergency personnel opening them from the outside. Which meant, all I needed was for someone on the outside to trigger the release mechanism. Realizing this, I slammed my fists against the heavy oak door, screaming at the top of my lungs. “Is anyone out there?! Help! Somebody help me!” Chloe sat at the kitchen island, calmly sipping a cup of tea. “Save your breath, Scarlett.” I glared at her with pure hatred. “Are you not afraid I will tell Garry about this?” Chloe looked at me like I had just told the funniest joke in the world. “Scarlett, do you actually still think you are the lady of this house?” “Tell Garry? So he can just humiliate you all over again?” “Don’t worry. I’ll be taking over your position as Mrs. Sinclair very soon.” “And you? You’ll be crawling on the floor like a stray dog, begging me to spare you and your pathetic mother.” I could hear my own voice trembling as I demanded to know why she was doing this. When she first moved to the city, she was completely broke. She couldn’t even afford to eat. I was the one who personally introduced her to Garry and got her her first high-paying job. “Do you have no conscience at all?” Her face instantly twisted with rage. “Why should I have a conscience?!” “We are both women! Why do you get to be born into a perfect life and marry a billionaire movie star?!” “And me? I have to work myself to the bone to pay for my brother’s tuition, buy him a house, and pay for his wedding!” “I’ve lived that life for twenty years! You can’t even handle it for two days?!” My body began to shake with mild tremors. I had arms and legs, yet I was completely imprisoned in this massive concrete cage. I couldn’t even make it to the hospital to look at my mother’s face one last time. Right at that moment, the electronic lock on the front door beeped. It clicked open. It was the cleaning lady who came every three days. The older woman gave me a polite nod. Seizing the only chance I had, I shoved past her and sprinted out the door. But I didn’t even make it across the front garden. Four private security guards materialized from all directions and tackled me to the grass. They bound my wrists with zip ties like I was a piece of trash and dragged me back inside, dumping me at Chloe’s feet. “Scarlett, Garry was very clear.” “If you refuse to behave, I have to punish you.” Without another word, she picked up a high-voltage stun baton from the floor, pressed the metal prongs directly against my chest, and pulled the trigger without an ounce of hesitation. The cleaning lady gasped, pulling out her phone to call Garry for instructions. Chloe offered a sweet, gentle smile. “Ma’am, Ms. Scarlett and Mr. Sinclair are officially divorced. She has no authority in this house anymore.” “Mr. Sinclair is on a business trip, and I am following his direct orders to keep her contained.” “Please, don’t make my job difficult, okay?” The electricity fried my nervous system. My vision blurred, and my mind started shutting down. Through sheer willpower, I managed to twitch my fingers, weakly begging the cleaning lady to call my uncle. But after a long moment of hesitation, the older woman quietly put her phone back in her pocket. Acting like nothing had happened, she picked up her supplies and started cleaning the living room. I weakly slammed my forehead against the marble floor, trying to use the physical pain to stay conscious. “Look at this, Scarlett. This might cheer you up.” Chloe squatted down next to me and held her phone in front of my face. It was playing a live security feed from the hospital. My mother was covered in tubes. Thick white foam was bubbling from her mouth as she desperately tried to make a sound to alert the nurses. But the hallway was empty. No one noticed. She kept throwing her head back, suffocating, fighting wildly for a single breath, letting out horrific, gurgling whimpers. And then, in absolute, agonizing despair, she stopped moving. I broke down into a hysterical, guttural scream. I violently thrashed against the zip ties, lunging upward, ready to bite Chloe’s throat out and die with her. But before I could even touch her, the guards pinned me back down. This time, Chloe jammed the stun baton directly into my stomach. A massive surge of electricity tore through my entire body. In the final seconds before I completely blacked out, I felt a warm, thick liquid sliding down the inside of my thighs. The unborn child I didn’t even know I was carrying was erased from existence in a matter of seconds. And Garry? He was standing in the garden right outside the window, holding a box of blueberry mousse cake.

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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 On the day of my wedding, I discovered my bridal makeup artist had been swapped with my bridesmaid’s. Lifting the heavy, beaded skirt of my wedding gown, I went looking for my groom, James. Instead, I found him leaning over a vanity chair, wrapping his arms possessively around my bridesmaid, Ivy. Ivy’s face was flawlessly painted with the exact bridal look the celebrity makeup artist had spent weeks designing exclusively for me. When she saw me, her voice dropped into a timid, trembling whisper. “Scarlett, please don’t be mad at James. I just thought it would be fun to try the bridal look. I will go wash it off right now. I am so sorry, I promise I won’t do it again…” James pressed a firm hand onto her shoulder, stepping in to take the heat. “Do not blame Ivy. I insisted on letting her experience a piece of the wedding.” He looked at me, his tone laced with absolute entitlement. “Scarlett, you already have me completely. Don’t be so petty about the ceremony details, okay?” I stared at them. Then, I nodded, unzipping the garment bag and tossing the custom wedding gown directly into his arms. “Since her bridal makeup is already done, she can have the dress, too. Let her have the whole ceremony. Make it perfect for her.” James’s eyes softened, mistaking my numbness for grace. “Scarlett, I promise you, after today, my heart and my body belong entirely to you. Only you.” I didn’t answer him. I simply reached out and took the bridesmaid dress from the rack. James had no idea that earlier this morning, I had received a phone call from myself three years in the future. This toxic, suffocating wedding? I was officially checking out. … “Wait.” I turned to leave, but Ivy called out to me. Her eyes darted nervously before settling into a stubborn glare. “I am sorry, Scarlett, but that bridesmaid dress was custom tailored for my measurements. I really don’t want…” She trailed off, biting her lip and casting a pitiful, helpless look up at James. Without a second of hesitation, James closed the distance between us and snatched the dress right out of my hands. “I will have someone find you another outfit. Stop trying to take things from Ivy.” I slowly uncurled my empty fingers. My eyes stung, rimmed with a faint red as I forced myself to ask the question. “You think I am the one taking things from her?” “She is wearing my bridal makeup. She is about to walk down the aisle with my groom. What do you call that?” A flicker of guilt crossed James’s face. He opened his mouth to speak, but Ivy quickly stepped between us, shielding him. “Scarlett, if you are angry, take it out on me! It is all my fault.” Tears welled up in her large, innocent eyes. “If I hadn’t loved him since we were kids, if I hadn’t taken our childhood marriage pact so seriously, if I hadn’t tried to end my own life over the pain of losing him… he wouldn’t pity me. He wouldn’t keep me around.” “It is all my fault! I shouldn’t have survived that day. Why didn’t I just die?” Ivy broke down into hysterical sobs, spiraling into a theatrical display of absolute despair. James instantly pulled her into a tight embrace, pressing frantic kisses to her forehead. “It is not your fault, Ivy. You did nothing wrong.” Ivy continued to hyperventilate until her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed against his chest, pretending to faint. James shot me a venomous glare. “Scarlett, if anything happens to Ivy, this wedding is permanently canceled!” My chest tightened. I was about to step forward and call out her pathetic acting, but my feet felt glued to the floor. “What are you standing there for? Go get a doctor!” James barked. “Forget it! Just stay out of my way.” He scooped Ivy up into his arms and shoved violently past me. I watched them rush down the hallway. As her head rested on James’s shoulder, Ivy opened her eyes, looked straight at me, and flashed a triumphant, mocking smile. My mind dragged me back to last night. James and I were supposed to do the final walkthrough of the banquet hall. Ivy had tagged along. She completely overturned the catering menu I had spent months curating. She even demanded the venue’s signature champagne roses be replaced with her favorite pink peonies. The event manager looked at me awkwardly, unsure whose orders to follow. James just waved his hand dismissively. “Do whatever Ivy wants.” By the time the walkthrough finished, it was nearly midnight. Ivy whispered that she was scared to take a cab alone. James instantly offered to drive her home. As for me, his fiancé? James didn’t even blink. “The venue is only a few blocks from our new penthouse. You can just walk back, Scarlett.” On that walk home, I was cornered in a dark alley by three aggressive thugs. Terrified, I dialed James’s number. Ivy answered the phone. “Scarlett? James is in the middle of changing his clothes.” “He promised to spend his final night as a bachelor with me,” she whispered into the receiver. “Oh, and as a thank you, I arranged a little bachelorette surprise for you in that alley. Have fun.” After that, James’s phone was turned off. Facing the advancing men, I fought like a feral animal. I kicked, I bit, I gouged with my nails. I barely managed to break through their circle and run for my life. During the struggle, my right arm was severely fractured. But because I didn’t want James to worry, and because I was so desperate to preserve our “perfect” wedding, I refused to get a cast. In reality, every passing second was a blinding, agonizing physical torment. When James shoved past me just now with Ivy in his arms, his shoulder slammed directly into my fractured arm. The pain was so intense my muscles spasmed. Involuntary tears spilled over my lashes, hot and bitter. Using my good left hand, I pulled out my phone and dialed the patriarch of the Sinclair family. “Arthur,” I said, keeping my voice dead level. “The expansion project in the volatile Eastern European sector. I will take it.” The line went dead silent for a long moment before the old man replied. “Are you absolutely sure about this, Scarlett?” “If you take this post, you and James will be living on opposite sides of the world. You will not be permitted to return for at least five years.” Tears continued to fall, blurring my vision. In my mind, I pictured James running back to me, grabbing my shoulders, and begging me to stay. But I blinked the tears away. James did eventually come back into the room, but the words out of his mouth were pure ice. “This is the only way you can atone for what you did to her.” “I am sure,” I told Arthur Sinclair over the phone. “I won’t regret it.” I ended the call and looked at James with absolute calm. “What does Ivy want now?” James’s brow furrowed in deep annoyance. “What is with that attitude, Scarlett?” “Ivy could have been happy today, but you had to trigger her! You almost caused her to have a psychological breakdown!” “She just wanted you to participate in a little game to warm up the crowd. Stop acting like she is making unreasonable demands!” I lost all remaining energy to defend myself. I stared at him for a few seconds. “Fine.” James froze, clearly caught off guard by my sudden compliance. The violent irritation in his eyes slowly melted into a patronizing tenderness. He reached out to touch my cheek. “Scarlett…” I turned my head, dodging his hand completely. “We are running out of time. I need to find a bridesmaid dress.” His voice grew thick and awkward. “You don’t need to.” “Ivy already prepared an outfit for you. If… if you don’t like it, just tell me, and I will have my assistant buy something else.” I treated his second sentence like white noise. Ever since Ivy attempted suicide over him, she had become his absolute priority. If Ivy and I ever clashed, the solution was always the same. I was expected to step back and satisfy her. I used to fight it. I used to scream and demand answers. James would just look at me with exhausted, judgmental eyes, treating me like a sinner on trial. “Scarlett, you owe her.” “If you hadn’t tempted me, if you hadn’t made me fall in love with you, I would have married Ivy. She was my destiny first.” So, it was my fault for being loved? I never understood his twisted logic, but the invisible ropes of guilt had always kept me bound. I always bowed my head to her. Yet, every time I yielded, James would shower me with overwhelming compensation. I was an orphan with only a high school diploma. James spent a fortune on elite private tutors and pulled strings to get me into a prestigious Ivy League business program. The moment I graduated, he convinced his grandfather to let me enter the Sinclair Group. He groomed me to be the heir. I still remembered the day I secured my first massive corporate acquisition. He lifted me off the ground, his eyes shining with pride. “Keep climbing, Scarlett. Once you are the CEO, I can just sit back and let my brilliant wife take care of me.” James genuinely wanted me to be more powerful than him. He meticulously paved the road, giving me the corporate throne that was supposed to be his by bloodright. I was deeply moved. I truly believed he was pushing me to the top because he loved me beyond reason. To repay his devotion, I sacrificed my youth and health, pouring every ounce of my soul into the company. James played the perfect supportive partner. But the reality was, every single act of kindness he showed me always had Ivy’s shadow lurking right behind it. I once asked him how long the three of us were going to stay trapped in this twisted dynamic. He kissed my hair and whispered gently into my ear. “Just wait until we are married. Once the rings are on, Ivy will finally let go.” I believed him. I waited. But today, on the very day of my wedding, I finally realized the only person who needed to let go was me. … “This is the dress Ivy prepared for me?” I stared at the garment. It was held together by two razor-thin straps, with a plunging, heavily exposed back. The fabric was a gaudy, cheap metallic gold. It looked like something a nightclub dancer would wear to a cheap gig. My expression turned ice cold. The young assistant holding the hanger kept her head bowed, terrified to look me in the eye. “Y-yes. Mr. Sinclair approved it.” “Understood.” I swallowed the surging waves of rage and disgust. Hooking my pinky finger under one of the flimsy straps, I walked into the fitting room. The wedding reception was massive. The guest list was a who’s who of the city’s elite. Over twenty media outlets had been invited to livestream the event. I knew exactly what would happen when I walked out in a trashy, revealing dress. I would be ripped apart by the press. If I were still the old Scarlett, the woman desperate to marry James, I would have refused to wear it. I would have marched up to Ivy and demanded an explanation. And James, swayed by a few fake tears, would have humiliated me in front of everyone to protect her. There was no point anymore. I was done playing their game. I put on the gold dress. The hem barely covered my upper thighs, threatening to expose me with every step. The thin straps dug into my skin, feeling like they would snap under the slightest pressure. My face remained an emotionless mask. Barefoot, I walked out onto the grand stage in the center of the ballroom. Ivy was standing there in my wedding gown. The bridal veil obscured her features, leaving only her smug, bright red lips visible. Seeing me, her smile widened. She grabbed James’s arm, pulling him toward the edge of the stage. “Look, Scarlett is coming out!” Then, Ivy let out a theatrical gasp. “Oh my god!” There were five other people on the stage with me. Five heavily muscled men wearing nothing but leather harnesses and tight shorts. They immediately surrounded me. After a few highly suggestive, aggressive dance moves, they started reaching out, attempting to tear the flimsy straps off my dress. James finally hit his breaking point. He lunged toward the stage. “Scarlett! That is enough!” Ivy wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, sobbing violently. “James, why is she doing this? She won’t even let me have a fake wedding? She…” Ivy began to hyperventilate, clutching her chest. James immediately held her, rubbing her back while shooting daggers at me. “Scarlett, get down here right now, and I will pretend this never happened! If you don’t…” “I will turn this fake wedding into a real one! I will marry Ivy today!” I didn’t respond. I was a little busy. Those five men were hired by Ivy specifically to strip me bare and destroy my dignity in front of the entire city. But hidden in the palm of my hand was a tiny, razor-sharp sewing blade. As they reached for me, I moved. Every time a hand came close, my blade found skin. Men are made of flesh and blood. They bleed. They feel pain. They feel fear. Seeing the absolute, feral lack of hesitation in my eyes, the five men panicked. Within seconds, they backed off and practically fled the stage. I wasn’t humiliated. Instead, I channeled the adrenaline of the fight into a sharp, commanding solo routine. The guests below couldn’t see the blood or the blade. They only saw a fierce, untouchable performance. The ballroom erupted into applause. Hearing the cheering, Ivy’s face twisted into an ugly sneer. She glared at me with pure, unadulterated hatred. James, however, was completely mesmerized. He unconsciously let go of Ivy, shrugged off his suit jacket, and walked onto the stage to drape it over my bare shoulders. “Scarlett, go back to the dressing room and put your bridal makeup back on.” “When it is time to exchange the rings, you will be the one on stage.” “You are the woman I am marrying. Ivy can play around, but she doesn’t get to take your place.” “Of course,” I smiled sweetly, acting as though his betrayal had never bothered me at all. He stared at me with intense reluctance as I walked off the stage, even taking a few steps to follow me. Panic flashed across Ivy’s face. She clutched her chest again, preparing for another fake medical emergency, but James had lost his patience. “I am not a doctor, Ivy. If you are really sick, go to the hospital.” “And give Scarlett her dress back.” … Humiliated and furious, Ivy stormed into my private dressing room. Before she could even open her mouth, I spoke. “Do you know why James loves me?” “Because you are a cheap wh*re!” Ivy spat bitterly. “He loves me because I am wild. I am a challenge he cannot fully conquer,” I said coldly. “But you? He doesn’t even have to lift a finger, and you are already crawling on your knees for him.” “You can never beat me, Ivy. Never.” “Smack!” I anticipated her raised hand and slapped her across the face before she could even strike. The impact left her completely stunned. It wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough. I looked at her with pure disdain. “I only let you win in the past because I didn’t care enough to fight. But now…” Feeling the absolute icy resolve in the room, Ivy lost her mind, screaming hysterically. “No! That is impossible! He loves me! He will always have a place for me in his heart!” “Want to make a bet?” I asked softly. “What kind of bet?” A few minutes later. James walked into my dressing room. Seeing the figure sitting with her back to the door, the tension in his face vanished. A gentle, loving smile spread across his lips as he approached. “Scarlett, why haven’t you changed into your gown yet?” The woman turned around. It was Ivy. She looked up at him timidly. “James.” James’s face hardened instantly. “Where is Scarlett?” Ivy stood up and wrapped her arms around him, stopping him from turning around. Like a desperate stray cat, she pressed her body against his back, her hands trailing provocatively down his chest. “James, take me right here. Right now.” “Since I can’t have a real wedding with you, let me have the one thing only a real husband and wife can do.” “Scarlett…” Ivy whispered against his neck. “She refused to wear the dress after I touched it. She went to get a backup gown from the designers.” James forcefully grabbed her wrists, trying to pull her off. “I need to go find her!” Ivy trembled. “James!” She mimicked my exact tone of voice, striking a commanding, seductive pose. James stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his head, his eyes slowly darkening with a twisted, obsessive lust. Ivy curled her finger, kicked the vanity stool out of the way, and sat up on the makeup counter. “Come here,” she ordered. James’s face was a mask of violent internal struggle. Ivy scoffed. “What are you so afraid of? Scarlett won’t be back for a while. Are you really telling me you don’t want a taste of me?” “Don’t worry. After today, I will never bother you again.” The woman sitting on the counter was no longer the pathetic, crying Ivy that James was used to. She was cold. She was arrogant. She was incredibly alluring. James slowly loosened his silk tie and stepped between her legs. “Ivy, if you become my woman, it is for life. You don’t get to leave until I give you permission.” “Watch me,” Ivy challenged, turning her head away. James grabbed her jaw, forcing her to look at him, and crashed his lips down onto hers. Ivy responded with frantic, desperate passion. They tangled together, completely lost to the world, tearing at each other’s clothes in the middle of the room. I stood silently behind the heavy velvet curtain of the fitting room, watching the entire scene unfold with dead, emotionless eyes. At the same time, I was broadcasting the live security feed directly to the massive projector screens in the main banquet hall. Just as Ivy locked her legs around him to stop him from pulling away for round two, I stepped out from behind the curtain and walked right past them. My social media account updated with a single post. Relationship status: Over. No going back. … It wasn’t until late that night that James finally found out I was leaving the country to take over the Eastern European sector. He drove like a madman back to our penthouse. I was standing by the door, suitcase in hand, when he burst through the entrance. “Scarlett, please, don’t leave!” His eyes were bloodshot, pleading with absolute desperation. His arrogance was completely shattered. “What happened with Ivy was a mistake! It was just lust! You are the only woman I actually love!” His phone started vibrating furiously in his pocket. He glanced at the caller ID and immediately moved to decline it. “Answer it,” I said calmly. “You wouldn’t want to live with any regrets.” James declined the call anyway and powered the phone off entirely. “It is just her usual suicide threats. I am sick of it. Scarlett, listen to me, we can start over…” I looked down, pulled out my phone, and pulled up a photo. I turned the screen toward him. “Ivy just accepted a proposal from a college classmate who has been in love with her for ten years.” “What?” James snatched the phone from my hand, staring in utter disbelief at the picture of Ivy holding a massive bouquet of red roses, pressed intimately against another man. He shoved the phone back into my chest. “Wait for me,” he ordered frantically, sprinting out the door and speeding off into the night. I didn’t wait. I grabbed my suitcase and got into my waiting car. Sitting in the backseat, I opened my airline app and canceled the flight to Eastern Europe. I opened my photo gallery and permanently deleted the badly photoshopped image of Ivy I had just shown him. Finally, I popped the SIM card out of my phone, snapped it in half, and tossed the pieces out the window into the dark streets. Goodbye, James. I am going to start a new life. And you can rot in the hell of your own regret.

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1 Every time I came back from Harrison Mercer’s bed, I would fill the clawfoot tub with cold water and sit in it until my skin turned numb. I scrubbed with a stiff loofah, scouring away the faint scent of cedar and expensive tobacco, scouring away the dark, mottled bruises he left on my collarbone. The gentler he was to me, the harder I had to remind myself: Don’t you dare love him. For five years, I followed that rule like scripture. Until the night Harrison dropped to one knee. He was the golden boy of Manhattan’s old money, kneeling on the parquet floor of his penthouse, looking up at me with an easy, boyish smile that made my chest ache. The diamond he slipped onto my finger was four carats of flawless platinum-set emerald cut, brilliant enough to make every society column in the city choke on its morning coffee. I was pathetic. I let myself waver. Then came the wedding day. The glass-walled conservatory in the Hudson Valley was filled with two hundred of New York’s most elite guests, but the altar was empty. Harrison was nowhere to be found. The officiant hovered near the archway, adjusting his collar with nervous, sweating hands. Across the room, a cluster of Harrison’s prep-school friends huddled together, nursing tumblers of bourbon and laughing behind their hands, taking blatant pleasure in watching me drown. They had always thought I was reaching too high. They expected a spectacle. They expected me to throw a hysterics-laced fit, to rip the lace, to demand answers and stain the marble with mascara. Instead, I gave them a faint, polite smile. I took the millions Harrison had funneled into my accounts over the past five years, and I walked out. I had known the truth from the very beginning. There was never any room for me in Harrison Mercer’s heart. Five years ago, the first night he ever brought me up to his apartment, I stood outside the half-open door of his study and listened to him scream into the receiver: “You’re ruthless, Sienna! You decide it’s over, and that’s it? What the hell was I to you? You really think I can’t survive without you?” “I got on my knees for you! I drank myself into the ER with bleeding stomach ulcers, and you didn’t even look back! Fine. Let’s see who caves first. I just found a girl who listens to me, someone a hundred times more compliant than you’ll ever be. Let’s see who suffocates first!” By the time he finished, his voice had cracked into a raw, jagged sob. Standing in the dim hallway, I had touched my own ribs and told myself: A broken bone takes a hundred days to knit. Keep your heart out of it, and you won’t even need that long. Three hours had passed since the ceremony was supposed to begin. Harrison still hadn’t shown up. Ignoring the glances darting between pity and mockery, I looked into the gilded vanity mirror and quietly reached behind my head. With two steady tugs, I unpinned the cathedral veil. Trevor Mercer, Harrison’s older brother, lounged against the doorframe of the bridal suite, an amused smirk playing on his lips. “Giving up already, Hazel?” he drawled, rattling the ice in his scotch. “Harrison’s just running late. If you want to be the next Mrs. Mercer, you’re going to need thicker skin than that.” I didn’t look at him. I reached for my lobes and unclipped the diamond earrings, setting them gently onto the velvet tray. Harrison’s cousin Brooke drifted over, her silk gown rustling against the carpet. Her tone was wrapped in sweet, honeyed poison. “Don’t take it to heart, Hazel. Harrison is always so punctual. If he isn’t here… well, maybe Sienna had another one of her episodes. Maybe she needed him.” She lingered over Sienna’s name, drawing it out like a slow strike of a match, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. I caught her reflection in the mirror and let out a soft laugh. “Take it to heart?” I repeated, setting the last pearl pin back into its velvet slot. “Why would I take it to heart?” The air in the room thinned out instantly. I turned around, my gaze skimming over their waiting faces. “Did you honestly think I sat in this chair for three hours because I was waiting for him?” Trevor’s smile vanished. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I stood up, reached around to the nape of my neck, and pulled the zipper of the custom Vera Wang gown down to my waist. “This dress cost sixty thousand dollars. It would have been a waste not to take a few photos first.” My voice was entirely even, as though I were remarking on the humidity outside. “Hazel, know your place!” one of the groomsmen snapped from the corridor. “Harrison giving you his name was charity! You think you can pull a runaway bride routine on a Mercer? You step foot out of this venue, and there won’t be an inch of this town left for you!” The zipper reached the base of my spine. The heavy silk and hand-sewn lace slid down my hips, pooling uselessly around my ankles. Underneath, I was already wearing a plain linen button-down and a pair of dark slacks. I bent down, sifted through the sea of platinum and diamonds scattered on the vanity, and picked up my battered, five-year-old iPhone. I looked at every pair of eyes locked on me, and smiled. “I never belonged here to begin with,” I said. “Which means I don’t have a single thing to lose.” Without waiting for their reactions, I stepped over the ruined silk and walked out. Harrison was the sole heir to the Mercer maritime and real estate empire. The people in his orbit had grown up with private jets and summer estates in Newport. To them, my modest background made me look like a plastic bead someone had mistakenly strung onto a strand of Mikimoto pearls. No one understood why Harrison had picked me. Even when he put an engagement ring on my finger, the quiet condescension in their eyes never softened. He was the one who had abandoned his own wedding. Yet I was the one they expected to endure the public humiliation. I could have stayed. I could have screamed at them, hurled five years of accumulated slights back into their smug faces. But I didn’t have the time. My flight was scheduled for tonight. I had an apartment to pack up. Besides, I wasn’t surprised that Harrison had vanished. The night before the wedding, I had lain awake in the king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling until my eyes burned. Around three in the morning, I unlocked my phone and, out of some morbid impulse, opened Sienna Blake’s livestream. She was selling discounted skincare from a cramped, poorly lit studio. In the five years since she had walked away from Harrison, life had clearly taken its toll on her. The viewer count was unusually high, but nobody was asking about the serums. The chat was moving at lightning speed, drowned out by animated gift banners from the channel’s top donor—an anonymous account with an avatar I recognized instantly. The comments rolled across the screen in bold, icy blocks of text: End the stream. Go to bed. Your stomach can’t handle late nights. If you pass out again, I’m not coming to the hospital. Unblock my number. Send me your routing details, and I’ll wire you the money. I’m getting married tomorrow. Stop reaching out, and wipe that miserable look off your face. With every cold command, the screen exploded in digital fireworks—thousands of dollars dropped in seconds. Harrison was generous to a fault; even with the woman he claimed to despise, he threw money around like dirt. Sienna’s sales pitch faltered. She wiped the corner of her eye with a trembling thumb, her voice dropping to a fragile whisper. “Harrison… don’t use your money to insult what we had.” What we had? his reply flashed across the screen. Sienna, I nearly died for you. I tore my family apart for you. And tomorrow, I am marrying a woman I don’t give a damn about just to scrub the memory of you out of my skull. I’ve lived like a madman trying to erase you. You let go first. You’re the one who burned us down. I stared at the words a woman I don’t give a damn about, feeling a strange, quiet pause settle into my chest. The comment section erupted, a chorus of strangers begging them to reunite, screaming for him to call off the wedding. Sienna bit her lower lip until it lost color, staring directly into the lens with tears spilling over her lashes. “Harrison,” she whispered. “If I said I’d come back… if I said I’d do whatever it takes to fix this… would you please not marry her?” 2 I didn’t stay on the stream long enough to see his answer. His empty spot at the altar was answer enough. Harrison’s inability to let Sienna go was never a secret. Two years ago, a recurring lumbar injury flared up, leaving me barely able to stand. New York had some of the finest orthopedic surgeons in the country, but Harrison insisted on flying me hundreds of miles north to a private clinic in Montreal. Predictably, we ran into Sienna in the lobby. She looked just as she did in the cracked photograph he kept hidden in the inner sleeve of his leather wallet—young, delicate, entirely unguarded. Harrison had his hand resting on the small of my back. When Sienna appeared, his face went rigid, his eyes shuttering into something unreadable. Only I felt it: the instant she stepped into view, his fingers clamped around my waist with such sudden, bruising force that I had to bite my tongue to keep from flinching. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, taking an awkward step back toward the automatic doors. “I didn’t know you’d be here… I’ll go. I swore I wouldn’t bother you.” The muscle in Harrison’s jaw twitched. I stood beside him in silence, my gaze drifting to her collarbone. She had a tiny, faded tattoo there: a line-art sketch of a golden retriever. It was an exact match for the black cat inked beneath Harrison’s left collarbone. “Move,” Harrison said, his voice like dry ice. Yet when we stepped into the elevator, his eyes never left the glass doors until they slid completely shut. “Keep a hold of that,” I told Sienna quietly as we passed her. “Don’t lose it.” She was clutching a black titanium card in her hand—an authorized user card tied directly to Harrison’s primary account. In business, Harrison destroyed anyone who crossed him without a second thought. That unlimited line of credit was the only mercy he had ever shown an enemy. A lifeline thrown to a woman he claimed he never wanted to see again. On our drive back across the border, the skies opened into a torrential downpour. Harrison drove with one hand on the wheel, his mind visibly elsewhere. When his phone screen lit up with an unsaved number, he glanced down and slammed his foot on the brake. The seatbelt caught, but the force hurled me forward anyway. My forehead slammed hard against the windshield. Warm blood immediately welled up, dripping down my temple. “Harrison…” Sienna’s voice came through the car speakers, choked with tears. “I know I shouldn’t call… but my mom’s vitals crashed. The doctors said it’s critical, and I don’t know who else to turn to… I’m so scared…” Harrison turned to look at me, the panic in his eyes spilling over. “Hazel, get out here and call an Uber. I have an emergency.” I had never seen him look like that. Not during hostile takeovers, not when the markets plummeted and his board threatened a revolt. He was so panicked that he made me get out on the shoulder of an unlit highway in freezing rain. He was so panicked that he floored the accelerator, sending spray across my shins as he sped off into the dark. He was so panicked that he completely forgot it was twenty-five degrees outside, and I was wearing nothing but a thin cotton sweater. He left. I stood on the gravel shoulder, shivering so violently my teeth clicked together. It was a dead stretch of road; no ride-share app would dispatch a car out there. I stood under the howling sleet for nearly four hours before I saw the twin amber beams of his hazard lights cutting through the fog. When he stepped out, his face was lined with exhaustion. “Sienna passed out,” he said, not meeting my eyes. I looked down at the slush soaking my flats. “I got to the clinic and found out her mother had just been admitted for observation,” he continued, taking my frozen, raw hands into his warm ones. “She panicked and exaggerated. I turned around to leave, and she hyperventilated and collapsed. She’s stable now.” He blew warm air onto my knuckles. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you out here so long… Her mental state has been fragile lately. I was afraid she’d do something stupid.” A dry ache settled in the back of my throat. “Have you really let her go?” I heard myself ask. If he was still this tangled up in her, I didn’t want to stand in the way. I had no interest in being a placeholder in a tragic romance. We drove in silence for miles before he finally spoke, his voice barely above a murmur. “There’s nothing to let go of. I’m not an idiot, Hazel. I don’t cling to dead things.” He paused, gripping the leather of the steering wheel. “She’s completely alone out there. I just… I felt sorry for her.” Right. He hadn’t let her go at all. After that night, Harrison made a conscious effort to scrub every mention of Sienna from my presence. I knew what he was doing, but I never pressed him. Whenever he crossed paths with her, he would quietly compensate me: a deed to a brownstone in Brooklyn, a pair of sapphire drop earrings from Harry Winston, an equity portfolio in my name. Gifts that would take a normal person two lifetimes of grinding to acquire. So what did it matter? A girl like me couldn’t afford to sacrifice generational wealth on the altar of petty pride. 3 Because everyone in his circle knew how deep the rot of his first love went, nobody believed I would last. When Harrison announced our engagement, the disbelief in their world was almost comical. A week before the wedding, Trevor hosted a lavish bachelor party for him at an exclusive subterranean club in SoHo. He booked the entire VIP mezzanine and invited a dozen models and socialites. Naturally, he invited Sienna, too. I showed up without a word of complaint. Harrison, however, seemed unsettled. He pulled me close by the elbow and murmured, “These people don’t know when to draw the line. If it gets loud, make an excuse and take the car home.” Before we could take two steps, Trevor stepped in front of us, wearing an unbuttoned silk shirt and holding two flutes of vintage Dom Pérignon. “Little sister-in-law,” Trevor smirked, handing me a glass. “You don’t usually run in our circles, so don’t feel bad if you can’t keep up. We play a little rougher than you’re used to.” I smiled, took the flute, and took a small, polite sip. Smoothing down the skirt of my dress, I kept my tone mild. “It’s fine. You guys have fun, just don’t keep him out too late. Keep an eye on Harrison for me, Trevor. Don’t let him drink too much scotch.” Harrison stiffened beside me, clearly caught off guard by how effortlessly I had dismissed it. Trevor didn’t notice his brother’s expression. He threw an arm over Harrison’s shoulder, grinning. “Look at that, Harrison! The lady gave you a hall pass. What are you waiting for? Come on in. I personally texted Sienna to make sure she came. Last night of freedom, man. Don’t waste it.” I was long past caring about Trevor’s juvenile provocations. I gave Harrison a small wave, signaling that I was heading toward the coat check. Suddenly, Harrison’s hand shot out, his fingers locking around my wrist. His brows knit together in a sharp, frustrated line. “Hazel. What is this? You’re pushing me into a room with her?” Pushing you? I thought. When were you ever mine to hold? I looked into his dark eyes, keeping my voice quiet. “If I asked you not to go in there… if I asked you never to speak to Sienna again… would you actually listen to me?” The bass from the club vibrated through the floorboards. The neon lights washed over his sharp features. Before Harrison could answer, Trevor pulled hard on his shoulder. “Harrison! Everyone’s waiting on you!” Harrison’s throat moved. His grip on my wrist loosened, his fingers sliding away inch by inch. “Wait for me at home, Hazel,” he muttered. Before he could finish the sentence, Trevor hauled him through the double doors. I stood in the dim corridor for a second, glanced through the narrow glass pane of the door, and turned toward the exit. As I passed the private lounges near the back, a loud crash echoed from inside room four, followed by the sound of glass shattering and a woman’s stifled sob. The voice was unmistakable. Before I could walk past, the door was shoved open. A man stumbled out, clutching a bleeding gash on his temple, reeking of tequila. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he slurred, spitting onto the carpet. “You hit me with a bottle? You’re not leaving until this is settled!” Inside, Sienna stood against the velvet banquette, her chest heaving, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “I don’t know you!” she cried out. “You wouldn’t keep your hands to yourself!” The man sneered, wiping the blood with the back of his sleeve. “Quit playing the innocent virgin, Blake. Either pay for the suit and the stitches, or you’re coming back inside.” Sienna’s reddened eyes darted to the doorway, landing straight on me. “Go ahead and stare, Hazel,” she said, her voice shaking with humiliation. “Laugh all you want. I might not have a billionaire backing me, but I’m not beneath you. Don’t you dare look down on me!” She spoke as if I were the one who had cornered her. The man grabbed her by the wrist. “Five grand for the jacket, five for the clinic. Hand it over.” “I don’t have it!” “Then finish every bottle on that table, and maybe I’ll let it slide.” The man’s eyes caught the corner of the black Amex peeking out of her clutch. “You’re carrying a Centurion card and crying broke?” “No!” Sienna screamed, clutching the purse to her ribs. “I can’t touch this! I won’t use his card!” She dropped to her knees by the low table, grabbing an open bottle of vodka and shoving the neck into her mouth. “I’ll drink it!” She swallowed desperately, coughing violently as the liquor burned her throat, but she refused to let go of the glass. It was exhausting to watch. “How much?” I asked, pulling out my wallet. “I’ll pay it.” “I don’t want your damn charity!” Sienna shrieked, swinging her arm back. The slap cracked across my face before I could step back. “It’s your fault!” she sobbed, completely unhinged. “You stole him from me! You had Trevor invite me tonight just so you could parade your ring in front of my face, didn’t you? And now you want to buy my dignity? Keep your dirty money!” My ears rang. The room tilted for a fraction of a second. As I braced my hand against the wall, the corridor doors flew open. Harrison charged into the room, brushing past me so fast the wind of his coat caught my hair. He didn’t look at my swollen cheek. He dropped to his knees, pulling Sienna into his chest, wrapping his heavy arms around her shaking frame. “Stop being so pathetic, Sienna!” he growled, his voice thick with fury. “Hit back! Why the hell aren’t you using the card I gave you?!” The stinging burn on my face radiated down to my jaw. Harrison lifted his head. When his gaze landed on me, his eyes were colder than ice. “Hazel,” he breathed, venom lacing every syllable. “You told me you were heading home. You came back here just to corner her?” I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. I didn’t bother defending myself. I just turned and walked away. He didn’t understand: I wanted him to think the worst of me. The more he hated me, the easier it would be to sever the cord when the time came. Harrison didn’t make it home until three in the morning. He smelled of heavy smoke and stale whiskey. I was still awake, sitting at the mahogany desk in the study, reviewing real estate listings and logistics for an overseas relocation. He came up behind my chair, leaning down to bury his face in my hair, his hot breath washing over my ear. “Why aren’t you in bed? Were you waiting for me?” “Yes,” I lied gently. “Is Sienna alright?” He went still for a second. “I’m sorry. I misjudged the situation. That guy was out of line. I handled it, saw her safely home, and came straight back.” He nuzzled the hollow beneath my jaw, his tone dropping into an uncharacteristic, coaxing whine. “I kept checking my phone all night. You didn’t send a single text. Are you still mad at me?” I didn’t have the energy to play along, but Harrison was relentlessly persistent tonight. He reached out, cupping my chin, forcing my face toward his. “Are you jealous, Hazel? I swear to God, I didn’t lay a finger on her. Trevor can swear to it. I didn’t touch anyone else either. Didn’t even take a number.” I looked into his dark, bloodshot eyes for a long moment, then let out a quiet sigh. “Come on,” I said, taking his arm. “Let’s get you to bed.” 4 I first met Harrison Mercer behind the northern gates of Columbia University, beside a weathered folding table where an old man sold used paperbacks. It was an October afternoon, and the sky was pouring gray sheets of rain. Harrison had just walked out of a private lounge across the street, shielded beneath a large black golf umbrella. His expression was pitch-black, like a man who had just finished tearing someone’s life apart. As he reached the curb to wait for his town car, the bookseller grabbed the sleeve of my damp trench coat, yanking back the medical dictionary I was about to replace on the shelf. “Hold on! You creased the corner of the plate! You break it, you buy it!” “I was only checking the publication year,” I pleaded, the cold wind whipping rain into my collar. “The dog-ear was already there.” “Bullshit! Thirty bucks, kid. You’re not walking away until I see thirty bucks!” In the scuffle, the frayed strap of my canvas tote finally snapped. My notebooks and textbooks spilled across the asphalt, into the greasy puddles. Tucked inside my anatomy syllabus, an overdue tuition notice with red ink stamped across the header fluttered out, instantly soaking through. As I dropped to my knees to gather the papers, a wide black umbrella tilted over my head, blocking the rain. “How much?” Harrison’s voice was low, cutting through the storm with effortless authority. The vendor froze, taking in Harrison’s custom wool coat and the black Maybach idling with its hazards flashing. His bravado vanished instantly. “Thirty… thirty dollars, sir.” Harrison didn’t reach into his pocket. His assistant stepped forward, peeled a crisp hundred-dollar bill from a leather clip, and handed it over. The old man snatched it and retreated behind his plastic tarps without another word. Harrison looked down at me. His eyes traveled over my dripping hair, down to the waterlogged tuition notice clutched in my raw, red hands. “Which school?” he asked. “…Columbia. Pre-med.” He gave a slight nod, handed me the umbrella, and crouched down into the dirty puddle beside me. Without hesitating, his tailored sleeves brushed the filthy asphalt as he gathered my soaked notebooks one by one, stacking them neatly. I stood there holding the heavy umbrella, stunned, watching as he slipped off his cashmere overcoat and draped it firmly over my shivering shoulders. “Get in the car,” he said. “I’ll drive you back to your dorm.” Inside the Maybach, the heat was set to seventy-two degrees, and the air smelled faintly of leather and amber. “You need money?” he asked, looking straight ahead at the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers. “Yes.” “Your name?” “…Hazel Davies.” He tapped two fingers against the stitched leather steering wheel, seeming to turn something over in his mind. “Stay with me,” he said, as casually as if he were ordering coffee. “I’ll cover your tuition, your living costs, and I’ll transfer fifty thousand dollars into your account on the first of every month.” Common sense screamed at me to refuse. It was grotesque, transactional, and entirely absurd. There was no such thing as a clean gift from a man like him. Yet out of the corner of my eye, I saw the discarded envelopes on the back seat—notices from high-end jewelers, stacks of hundred-dollar bills casually tossed beside a carbon-fiber briefcase. I wavered. I was drowning in debt. My mother had died leaving behind medical bills that seemed designed to crush me, and my part-time shift at the campus library barely paid for groceries. I needed the money. I needed to breathe. The car pulled up to the curb outside my run-down student housing. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Harrison didn’t push me to get out. He just waited. “Why?” I asked, my voice small. He turned his head to look at me, his eyes entirely devoid of warmth. “You look like someone who doesn’t cause trouble.” He paused, then added, “And to me, that kind of money is nothing.” He was right. It was nothing. My desperation, my late-night tears over unpaid bills, my entire existence was a rounding error in his universe. I looked down at the soaked textbooks in my lap. “…Thank you,” I whispered. “I’ll pack my things.” Back then, I didn’t know why he had chosen me. It wasn’t until weeks later, when I heard him shouting into the phone about Sienna, that the puzzle pieces clicked into place. I was never a lover to him. I was a spiteful prop, a piece of living furniture he had purchased to prove to his ex-girlfriend that she was replaceable. Perhaps it was the lure of the money. Or perhaps it was that first flicker of foolish gratitude I had felt when he knelt in the rain to pick up my books. Whatever it was, I chose silence. I knew the terms of the arrangement. Anything was fine—so long as I never asked for his heart. Back in the Hudson Valley dressing room, Harrison’s friends had finally realized that I wasn’t bluffing. Unnerved by my quiet departure, Trevor had stepped into the hallway to dial Harrison’s private line. “Harrison! Hazel just walked out. She’s heading back to the city to pack—it looks like she’s leaving for good!” Over the speakerphone, I could hear the faint sound of music and a woman’s light, teasing laughter. Harrison’s voice came through, heavy with the lazy irritation of someone who had been disturbed during a pleasant afternoon. “Leaving? What kind of tantrum is she throwing now?” “Harrison, it’s your wedding day,” Trevor said, his tone strained. “Every seat in the house is filled.” “So what?” Harrison let out a soft, dismissive chuckle. “Tell her to stop acting like a child. Tell her I’ll be there as soon as I wrap things up here.” “Harrison, she isn’t throwing a tantrum. She—” Harrison cut him off, his voice drifting into casual indifference. “She has that pair of south sea pearl earrings I bought her in Paris last month. Tell her to put them on. They match the veil.” There was a long pause on Trevor’s end. “…I don’t think earrings are going to fix this, man. She looked serious.” “What is there to fix?” Harrison sighed, the sound of ice clinking against glass audible through the line. “She stayed with me for five years because of the money, Trevor. The brownstones, the stock portfolios, the jewelry—did I ever shortchange her on anything? Putting on an act like this… she’s overestimating her leverage.” He took a slow sip of his drink. “Tell her I’ll wire another million to her Chase account. Tell her to sit tight. If she’s still sulking when I get back, I’ll say a few nice things. She’s a woman, Trevor. Give her a little attention, and she’ll come around.” The line went dead. The corridor outside the bridal suite fell into absolute, suffocating silence. The friends who had spent the last three hours sneering at me now stood frozen, their expressions complicated and faintly uneasy. Because of the money. Give her a little attention, and she’ll come around. I looked at the four-carat emerald-cut diamond sitting alone on the marble vanity. A dry, humorless smile touched my lips. Then I pushed open the heavy oak doors, walked past their stunned faces, and stepped out into the crisp, clean afternoon air. Let him keep his money. And let him keep his love for Sienna Blake.

🌟 Continue the story here 👉🏻 📲 Download the “MotoNovel” app 🔍 search for “620846”, and watch the full series ✨! #MotoNovel

Every time my husband beats me on his livestream, I have to secretly touch up my fake bruises on the floor. If I am even a second too slow, the cuts and gashes heal right in front of the camera. Honestly, this godforsaken healing factor is a nightmare. But during today’s stream, a highly annoying comment floated across the screen. “Bro, stop hitting her. Your wife isn’t human. She is a Reaper Butterfly. Once the pupa breaks, it feeds on human flesh!” I fluttered my invisible, innocent wings. Oh my. Looks like someone finally figured it out. Too bad it is already way too late. 1 Just because I said “thank you” to the delivery guy, my husband, Dexter, grabbed me by the hair and threw me across the room in front of thousands of viewers. “You shameless sl*t! Are you that desperate for male attention? If you do not talk to another man for a single day, do you just lose your mind?” Instead of getting angry, I kept apologizing to him. I even dropped to my knees, hugging his leg, swearing I would never do it again. The viewers were absolutely furious, flooding the chat to curse out our completely twisted dynamic. “Does this woman have some kind of abuse kink? She is gorgeous. Why the hell is she staying with this worthless piece of trash just to get beaten every day?” “Any OG fans here? Is this a scripted bit? Because that hit looked way too real.” “Everyone just mind your own business. The neighbors called the cops on them multiple times. Last time, she was beaten so badly she ended up in the ICU. But she literally told the cops it was a private marital issue. Stop wasting your pity on her!” Dexter watched the superchats and digital gifts flooding the screen. The money made him manic. “Keep the gifts coming, boys! I am going to show you what a real man looks like!” “A good wife is molded by discipline! Women are wired to submit. The harder you hit her, the more she begs you to stay!” Dexter’s entire channel revolved around him abusing and “training” me. Every time my face was swollen and bruised, he raked in a massive wave of donations from toxic viewers. To keep the hype going, Dexter pinned me to the floor and rained heavy punches down on me. He did not stop until I lay there, my eyes rolling back into my head. But before I could carefully act out my recovery and crawl back up, I realized the severe lacerations from his knuckles were already closing. Speechless. This absurd healing factor was going to blow my cover. I discreetly reached into my pocket, smearing a fresh layer of FX makeup and fake blood over my face. When the camera finally caught me again, my eyes were blackened, my cheeks were swollen, and terrifying gashes lined my jaw. I looked absolutely pathetic. Coupled with my continued gentle, subservient behavior, I looked like the perfect, broken maid. This made a bunch of jealous male viewers completely lose their minds. They kept spamming the chat, demanding to know how Dexter managed to bag a woman like me. Dexter was visibly out of breath. He panted heavily before smirking at the camera. “My wife is just naturally built for this. The more I discipline her, the better she behaves. If I skip a day, she practically begs for it!” The comment section was completely polarized. Half the people were violently criticizing him, and the other half were praising his “alpha” control over his household. Suddenly, a bizarre comment popped up out of nowhere. A user named CryptidWatcher typed a message in bold red text. “Your wife is not a human being. Only a Reaper Butterfly possesses a skin suit that flawless.” 2 “You playing fantasy RPGs in the chat, bro? If my wife is a killer butterfly, then I am the God of War!” Being mocked by the entire chat did not deter CryptidWatcher at all. He started dropping biological lore. “The Reaper Butterfly, also known as the Tiger-Banded Flesh-Eater, is infamous for its terrifying carnivorous nature. In 1966, a boy collecting insect specimens accidentally stumbled into a swarm of them. He was picked completely clean down to his skeleton in minutes. That is why they are called Reaper Butterflies.” He probably thought he was helping, but his warning only drew more insults. “Even if you are jealous that his wife is hot, you do not have to make up schizo conspiracy theories! Has she not suffered enough?” “Exactly! How the hell does a butterfly turn into a person? Wake up, buddy, this is not a sci-fi movie!” Some viewers even accused CryptidWatcher of being a paid actor, claiming this was just a new script Dexter wrote for views. Dexter started to panic. He was terrified that this weirdo was going to ruin his cash flow. He reached for his mouse to ban the user. But then another message popped up. “Has your wife ever been pronounced dead by doctors, only to mysteriously come back to life?” “And ever since then, you have been having night terrors, right? The scales on a Reaper Butterfly carry a potent, hallucinogenic neurotoxin. The more you beat her, the more of that dust you inhale. Eventually, you will just become her food.” Reading those words, Dexter froze. He never used to dream. But ever since we got together, he was plagued by suffocating nightmares every single night. Sometimes, he could not even tell the difference between reality and his dreams. Three months ago, he got blackout drunk and hit me way too hard. He practically beat me to death. When they rushed me to the hospital, the doctors pronounced me dead on arrival. But an hour after the time of death, I crawled right out of the morgue. The story of the dead woman coming back to life had dominated the local news for a week. Most importantly, he suddenly realized I never seemed to sweat. Even in the dead of summer, my skin was always cool and dry. Cold sweat began to bead on Dexter’s forehead. The more he thought about it, the more terrified he became. He shot a highly unnatural, paranoid glance in my direction. “So what do I do?” Dexter typed back quietly on his phone. “If you do not believe me, sneak in on her while she is taking a shower. I guarantee you she never lets a single drop of water touch her skin. If I am wrong, I will gift you ten superchats right now!” The live chat exploded again. “Are you that down bad, dude? You are trying to trick this guy into streaming his wife in the shower?” “Streamer, you are not actually going to force your wife to bathe on camera to prove a point, right?” “Yo, do it! If you stream her in the bathroom, I will drop a thousand bucks right now!” The endless stream of donations and hype made Dexter’s eyes light up. Right at this moment, his concurrent viewer count broke one million. His subscriber count was skyrocketing. Sure, most of them were cursing him and the CryptidWatcher guy out, but traffic was traffic. Dexter’s eyes shifted. He made a split-second decision. “Keep the donations coming, boys! Tonight, we are going myth-busting. We are going to see if this CryptidWatcher is full of crap!” 3 Whether his wife was human or not, shouldn’t a husband know best? In Dexter’s mind, he had already labeled this user as a troll. The guy just saw that beating women generated traffic and wanted to create a viral gimmick to piggyback off the clout. Dexter figured he might as well play along and scam the guy out of his ten superchats first. He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me across the hallway, throwing me onto the bathroom tiles. He slammed the door shut, locking us inside, and gave the camera a contemptuous smirk. “Look at this. Have you ever seen a man-eating butterfly look this pathetic?” The chat was spamming laughing emojis. They started a countdown, waiting for Dexter to force me under the water. I looked up at my battered, bruised reflection in the mirror. Ever since Dexter became a millionaire streamer off the back of domestic abuse, I made sure to encourage him. Every time he hit me, I would cry and tell him to hit me harder. With every impact, invisible scales fluttering with a pearlescent glow fell from my body. He inhaled every single speck of it into his lungs. The more he breathed in, the closer he got to becoming my personal puppet. I was squatting on the floor, pretending to scrub the tiles, just like normal. Suddenly, a sharp pain shot through my scalp. Dexter was dragging me toward the tub. His phone screen was completely covered in notifications. Digital cars, yachts, and diamond rings were flashing endlessly, as if money meant nothing. He was completely blinded by the viral fame. He grabbed my wrists and shoved me hard against the cold porcelain. “Hurry up! Take a shower for the camera!” 4 My knee slammed into the edge of the cabinet. I curled into a tight ball, acting as though I was in agonizing pain. The viewers were starting to feel sick. The chat flooded with people begging Dexter to stop. This killer butterfly thing was obvious bullshit! Dexter ignored them. He aggressively grabbed the showerhead, turned the cold water on full blast, and sprayed me from head to toe. The icy water plastered my hair to my face and soaked right through my clothes. I looked utterly helpless and broken. My species absolutely despises water. When moisture clings to our bodies, it feels thick and suffocating. In the wild, if a butterfly falls into a puddle, the heavy water droplets weigh down its fragile wings, stripping away its ability to fly. Once we lose our mobility, it basically means a death sentence. I grabbed the hem of Dexter’s shirt, crying helplessly, begging him to stop being angry. But even after ten minutes of being drenched in cold water, my body did not change at all. I did not lose control of my mind. I just stayed exactly as I was a weeping, terrified woman. Seeing my fragile, shivering frame, the audience completely turned on CryptidWatcher. They spammed the chat with death threats aimed at him. It took a long time before CryptidWatcher finally sent another message. “I understand now. The Reaper Butterfly did not shapeshift into your wife. It is parasitically attached to your wife’s nervous system. That is why the body does not react to water.” I looked directly at the camera lens and offered a sweet, innocent, terrified smile. Well, well. Who knew there was actually someone left in this world who understood the parasitic secrets of the Reaper Butterfly? 5 My kind has one highly specialized ability. We can sever our consciousness from our physical form and parasitize a host. It is a shame that recognizing it will not save him. “Get out of here, you scammer! First you say my wife is a bug that hates water. I just proved you wrong. She is a living, breathing human being.” “Now you are starting rumors that she is infected with a parasite? You are just trying to get out of paying up!” Dexter was genuinely furious. This CryptidWatcher guy had not sent the ten superchats he promised! “Streamer, listen to me. The day the butterfly breaks out of its cocoon is the day you die. Run. Run right now!” CryptidWatcher added dozens of exclamation points at the end of his message. It looked incredibly eerie on the screen. Dexter glared at the text. Furious, he instantly banned CryptidWatcher from the channel, cursing him out for being a psycho. A sinister, dark glint flashed in Dexter’s eyes. It was chilling to watch. The viewers were still riled up. They felt scammed by the lack of a supernatural reveal and started threatening to unfollow the channel. Seeing his numbers drop, Dexter panicked. He immediately grabbed me by the throat and slammed me against the bathroom wall. His massive fists crashed down onto my body. I trembled like a leaf in the wind, helplessly wrapping my arms around my head. My screams and desperate begging filled the room. Instantly, the viewer engagement spiked again. The digital gifts resumed their endless flow. About ten minutes later, Dexter stood over me, panting heavily. He looked at the screen with absolute satisfaction. “Alright boys, that is enough discipline for today. Do not want some white knight calling the cops again. If you are new here, hit that follow button so you do not miss the next stream!” The chat went wild. “Honestly curious. Are you not worried you are going to accidentally beat her to death one day?” Dexter let out a cruel sneer and spat on the floor next to me. “My wife is cheap trash. She is practically immortal. Do not worry about it. If she dies, I will take the charge! Just drop a follow for your boy Dexter!” Watching his follower count surge by another hundred thousand, Dexter smugly ended the stream. He grabbed his jacket and walked out the front door to go drinking, completely unbothered. Once his footsteps faded away, I stretched my stiffened limbs. I reached up and casually snapped several dislocated bones back into place. The cracking sound echoed through the empty house. I adjusted my slightly fractured jaw. This man really did hit hard. It was a shame that this level of pain felt like an absolute tickle to me. Dexter was right about one thing. I really could not be beaten to death. Because the person he actually killed was already gone. 6 I am the very last Reaper Butterfly in this world. Three months ago, I watched with my own eyes as Dexter slowly, brutally murdered a gentle, kindhearted girl. I had been severely burned in a forest fire. That girl found me and saved me. She kept me in her room, carefully nursing me back to health. I still remember her smile. It was so pure. It was blindingly bright. Every beautiful word in the human language would not be enough to describe her. She called me Little Wing. She told me I was her precious treasure. It was a tragedy that such a perfect girl was trapped in a living hell. Her husband, Dexter, was not just a domestic abuser. He was a violent poacher. He made his living slaughtering endangered animals deep in the mountains. The moment he saw me, he recognized my rare, stunning wing patterns. He knew I would fetch a massive price from black-market specimen collectors. To stop him from selling me, the girl secretly opened the window and set me free. When Dexter realized his payday was gone, he lost his mind. Fueled by cheap liquor, he completely stripped away his own humanity. He slammed his fists into her fragile body over and over again. “You stupid b*tch! You ruined my money! I am going to kill you!” Stab after stab. Bright crimson blood poured from her body, soaking entirely through the living room rug. Such a beautiful, selfless girl, stabbed to death by her own husband all to protect a tiny, insignificant butterfly. In the very last second before she stopped breathing, I swooped down and pierced her skin with my parasitic stinger. But this kind of parasitism comes at a devastating cost. I had to sacrifice my original body. A Reaper Butterfly can live for three hundred years. Humans barely live to see a century. But for the sake of revenge, I was willing to sacrifice everything. When I opened my eyes again, I was her. My powerful regenerative abilities rapidly glued her shattered body back together. Her fading life force flared back into existence. People online always asked why I refused to leave Dexter after being beaten so mercilessly. I would never leave. This was a grand, meticulously planned feast, and I was just getting started.

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1 After the miscarriage, I began pulling away from my husband, Major General Derek Brooks. It was a quiet, deliberate retreat. When his division’s field exercise was scheduled to wrap up on the seventh, I traded shifts at the military hospital so I wouldn’t be off until the eighth. When he was required to attend formal command dinners, I cited emergency surgical rotations and stayed behind in scrub greens. On the rare weekends he took leave to stay at our quarters on base, I submitted travel requests for remote medical inspections, disappearing for an entire week at a time. I took it so far that when I was falsely accused of a protocol violation and placed in the provost marshal’s holding cell—where release required a spouse’s signature—I looked the military police officer in the eye and said I had no next of kin. I sat alone on that cold steel cot for three days. In the end, it was my complete detachment that set a torch to his temper. The afternoon I was released, the first winter snow was drifting down over the parade grounds outside Washington. I had just stepped down the concrete stairs of the detention facility when a matte-drab command rig skidded to a halt in the slush before me. The door flew open. Derek crossed the gravel in three long strides, his winter trench coat flaring, his dark brows knotted in furious bewilderment. He caught my wrist, his grip unyielding, his eyes rimmed with raw, suppressed heat. “Nora, you were locked in the brig for seventy-two hours. Why the hell didn’t you call me?” His voice shook with a dangerous restraint. “Do you even consider me your husband anymore?” I looked at him, and against the freezing wind, I simply smiled. Derek, I thought, from the very beginning, you were the one who never treated me as a wife. “Call you?” I asked softly, my voice barely carrying over the idling diesel engine. “Have you ever actually answered when I did?” On the night the MPs hauled me in, I dialed his encrypted satellite line twenty-seven times. Every single call dropped into a dead dial tone. Derek’s expression faltered. A hairline fracture appeared in his military composure. “Natalie had acute gastritis that night. I had to rush her to Walter Reed. The doctors said she needed complete quiet, so I… I powered down my comms.” “It doesn’t matter,” I said, my tone as level as an EKG flatline. “I didn’t intend to trouble you anyway. Go on with your business.” Derek’s fingers tightened on my wrist. “Why aren’t you yelling at me?” He stared down at me, his jaw clenched, searchingly frantic for something—anger, tears, resentment—anything he knew how to manage. There was an unfamiliar, gnawing panic behind his dark pupils. “Why should I be angry?” I asked gently. “I’m tired, Derek. I just want to go home.” I twisted my wrist free from his hold, walked past him, and climbed into the rear seat of the rig. The drive across the garrison was suffocatingly quiet. Tires churned through gray slush. Derek kept watching me in the rearview mirror, his knuckles white against the steering wheel. Finally, he couldn’t take it. “Are you still holding the past against me?” “General Brooks,” I interrupted, resting my temple against the cold glass. “What is it you want from me? Would you prefer I revert to how I was years ago—trailing behind you like a shadow, begging for scraps of your time? Or do you prefer me like this? Quiet, reasonable, giving you all the operational clearance you could ever want?” The question struck him like shrapnel. He opened his mouth, then closed it. “I just feel like you’ve turned into a stranger,” he muttered under his breath. I looked out at the bare birch trees lining the post. When a woman loves a man, she is one person; when that love turns to ash, she becomes someone else entirely. There was nothing strange about it. The silence settled back over the cab, thick and poisonous. Derek parted his lips to speak again, but the sharp ring of his secure phone cut him off. The Bluetooth system patched through Natalie Cross’s bright, petulant voice: “Derek? I’m in the city doing supply procurement for the gala, but there are way too many crates. The transport isn’t here. You have to come pick me up.” Derek’s eyes darted toward me in the mirror. I didn’t move. I kept looking out the window, as if the conversation were in a language I didn’t speak. An irritation flared in his tone, meant perhaps to perform discipline for my benefit. “Natalie, do you not have an assigned driver? Is your security detail just decorative?” “They used to be you,” Natalie countered, her voice honeyed with unearned familiarity. “If you don’t want to come, fine. I’ll just call that deputy commander from the Third Battalion. He spent all yesterday telling me how much he wanted to take me out.” Derek’s knuckles popped against the leather wheel. “Stay where you are.” He terminated the call. He turned his torso slightly toward the back. “Nora, I—” “I’ll take the quartermaster’s flatbed back to housing,” I said. My hand was already on the door handle before the vehicle had fully idled at the crossroads. “Go get her. She’s the four-star Chairman’s granddaughter. It wouldn’t do to keep her waiting.” “Nora!” He vaulted out of the driver’s seat, catching my trench coat sleeve in the swirling snow. “She and I are just family friends now. Our grandfathers served together in the Gulf. I can’t just leave her stranded on the curb—” “I understand,” I said, meeting his eyes without a flicker of warmth. “I completely understand.” An army supply truck was rumbling past the intersection. I raised my hand, signaled the driver, and swung myself effortlessly into the high cab. In the side mirror, Derek stood marooned in the churned mud and falling snow, his rigid silhouette shrinking into a solitary, dark speck before the road curved and wiped him out entirely. My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was an encrypted line from the Medical Command dispatch office. “Major Miller. Your deployment request for the remote northern border surgical team has been approved. However… do we need to coordinate this with General Brooks? This forward station has an open-ended deployment timeline.” I looked at the gray highway stretching toward the tree line. “No coordination necessary. My divorce petition and deployment request were submitted on the exact same morning. As soon as the paperwork clears the JAG office, I deploy.” The line fell dead for two long beats. “Five years ago, you gave up a prime fellowship with the UN Peacekeeping surgical team just to stay stationed at his command post,” the personnel officer murmured, a note of quiet pity in her voice. “Why walk away now?” I smiled a small, tired smile. “Because I don’t love him anymore.” I hung up, leaned my head back against the vinyl seat, and closed my eyes. For the last seven years, everyone on this base knew Captain Nora Miller was hopelessly, foolishly in love with Derek Brooks. God, I was tired. Loving a man whose heart was permanently barricaded by another woman’s ghost was a slow, daily execution. I first laid eyes on Derek at the Officer Candidate School training grounds. He had stood on the wooden review stand, broad-shouldered beneath his crisp dress greens, his silver rank insignia catching the morning glare. His jawline was carved from granite; his eyes held the lethal precision of a sniper. Half the women in our cohort had flushed crimson just looking at him. I had been one of them. Yet no one dared step into his orbit. Everyone in the command structure knew that Derek Brooks’s heart belonged entirely to Natalie Cross. Natalie was spoiled, impulsive, and untouchable. She treated military installations like private country clubs, drifting through secure zones with a flick of her blonde hair. Derek guarded her, indulged her, surrendered his ironclad principles for her. The entire post whispered that the ice-cold general kept all his warmth reserved for a single girl. For as many years as he shielded Natalie, I watched him from the periphery, nursing an ache I never dared name. Until Natalie tore up nine consecutive marriage applications. The first time, she laughed and said she refused to be shackled to military protocol. The second time, she claimed she was terrified of becoming a lonely officer’s wife. The third time, she pouted that his duty mattered more than her whims. … On the ninth time, on the very morning the JAG office was set to file their paperwork, she boarded an international flight for Paris. She sent him a text from the tarmac: Derek, I thought about it, and I love my freedom more. Go defend the country. I’ll see you around. That time, Derek didn’t chase her past international borders. He spent three months in stone-cold silence. Then, bowing to immense pressure from high command and his family, he began accepting blind dates arranged by the brass. He met them, dismissed them, and froze them out. One after another, the matches disintegrated. When the rumors reached the base clinic, my heart hammered like a trapped bird. Through back-channel filings and medical liaison requests, I managed to secure an introduction. On the day we met at the officers’ club, I did something foolish and desperate: I wore a white eyelet cotton dress—the exact silhouette Natalie favored in summer. Sure enough, when Derek looked up and saw me standing in the doorway, his eyes lost their sharp focus. A phantom drifted across his face. He stared at me for an eternity, his gaze looking straight through my flesh to someone across the Atlantic. Then he said, “Let’s file the paperwork.” My heart, which had been racing in my throat, plunged straight into a subterranean trench. I knew then that he was only using me to catch the reflection of another woman. Yet I still nodded. I loved him too much. I loved him so deeply that even if he offered me nothing but the hollow shell of a marriage, I still wanted to stand by his side. For five years, we lived in immaculate, sterile politeness. Derek gave me everything the regulations allowed: base housing allowances, medical clearances, absolute respect within his operational domain. Not a single marital courtesy was withheld. But I knew none of it was love. He never crossed the boundary of emotional intimacy. The only times he lost his rigid control was when I wore those white summer dresses; in the dark, he would pull me hard against his chest, burying his face in my hair, whispering, “Nat…” Every single time, I lay beneath him, staring at the ceiling, pretending I was deaf. Five years passed like that. I was naive enough to believe we could endure in this cold truce forever. Until Natalie returned to the States. I was three months pregnant then. One afternoon, a sudden, blinding pain seized my lower abdomen. Sweating through my clothes, I was crawling toward the landline to call the clinic when our front door was pushed open. Natalie strolled into our quarters, looking down at me with cool, diamond-hard eyes. “So you’re Nora?” She circled me, her gaze dripping with contempt. “I heard you couldn’t wait to crawl into my bed the second I left the country.” Cramp after cramp ripped through my pelvis. Cold sweat soaked my hair. I tried to push past her toward the phone, but Natalie blocked the corridor, her arms crossed. In my agony, I reached out to shove her away. Natalie stumbled back, caught her footing awkwardly, and her temple clipped the sharp corner of the steel utility frame by the pantry. Blood immediately welled across her hairline. That evening, Major General Derek Brooks arrived with two armed MPs and personally ordered me into the base lockup for assault. I had gripped the iron bars of the detention cell, screaming until my vocal cords shredded: “Derek! Derek, please… call an ambulance! The baby… save our baby!” No one came. I curled into a ball on the bare concrete floor as thick, warm blood soaked through my combat trousers. Before darkness swallowed me, the last thing my eyes registered was the deep, spreading stain of crimson pooling beneath my knees. When I woke up, the fluorescent lights of Walter Reed were humming overhead. The room smelled of iodine and loss. The baby was gone. Derek stood at the foot of the bed, his uniform immaculate, his face lined with an uncomfortable shadow of guilt. “It was my mistake,” he said quietly. “Once you’re discharged, we’ll try again. I’ll give you another child.” He looked at my bandage-wrapped arms, trying to justify himself: “If you hadn’t shoved her, I wouldn’t have put you in the brig. Natalie has a severe congenital clotting disorder. A head injury like that could have been fatal. I panicked… I’ll make it up to you, Nora. I promise.” I looked at him, and a laugh tore out of my dry throat. I laughed until hot tears tracked down into my hairline. “Derek,” I whispered, “what kind of compensation buys back a dead child?” That was the last time I ever wept in front of him. From that day forward, the Nora who loved him vanished. I quietly signed the divorce petition and submitted my transfer to the tactical forward surgical team on the northern frontier. Whatever he did with Natalie Cross from that moment on couldn’t stir a single ripple in my chest. My love had bled to death on the concrete floor of that holding cell. The supply truck dropped me off at the edge of the officers’ housing quarters. The two-story colonial brick house was cavernous, echoing with the sound of my own boot heels on the hardwood. I walked upstairs to our bedroom and pulled a duffel bag from the closet. One by one, I took down the white dresses—the ones I had bought to look like Natalie—folded them with military precision, and shoved them deep into a trash bag. I wouldn’t need to wear another woman’s skin ever again. Downstairs, the front door clicked open. Heavy boot steps mingled with the lighter click of designer heels. Derek walked into the foyer, Natalie trailing right behind him in a cashmere coat. “Nora. Long time no see,” Natalie said from the bottom of the stairs, flashing a triumphant smile. “Natalie wanted to see Bolt,” Derek said, his voice unusually tight as he glanced up at me. Bolt was a retired Belgian Malinois military working dog that Derek and Natalie had handled together years ago. After Natalie abandoned him, I was the one who fed him, brushed him, and rehabilitated his hip dysplasia. “Be my guest,” I said, not even pausing as I carried a box toward the landing. “Bolt!” Natalie immediately blew a brass handler’s whistle. A dark, muscular shape burst out of the utility room. Seeing Natalie, the Malinois let out a high-pitched whine of excitement, leaping up to plant his massive paws on her shoulders. “He still remembers me!” Natalie buried her face in the dog’s neck, casting a pointed glance toward the staircase. “I guess it doesn’t matter how well the temporary babysitter feeds you—nothing beats your real owner.” It was a blatant, deliberate strike. My hand rested on the banister, but I didn’t turn around. Derek’s face darkened. “Natalie, the day you surrendered his service records, you forfeited all ownership rights. You’ve seen him. I’m driving you back.” Natalie looked out the living room window. “It’s pouring outside, Derek. The mountain roads off-post are washed out with slush. Would it kill you to let me sleep in the guest room for one night?” Derek frowned, clearly preparing to refuse. Outside, thunder cracked across the Virginia sky, shaking the windowpanes as sleet lashed the glass. Before he could speak, I leaned over the railing. “The downstairs guest room is unlocked. Extra linens are in the hall closet. Help yourself.” I stepped into my room and shut the door with a dull latch. Outside, the hallway went dead silent. Then came Natalie’s muffled, smug chuckle through the wood: “See? Even your wife doesn’t mind.” Derek didn’t answer. Around two in the morning, I was ripped from sleep by a suffocating, chemical stench. I threw open the bedroom door. The second-floor hallway was already an inferno of rolling, black smoke and roaring orange tongues of flame. I pulled my pajama collar over my mouth and nose, dropping low, crawling toward the staircase. But the lack of oxygen took my legs out from under me; within three paces, my vision swam, and I collapsed against the drywall. Through the shimmering heat and blinding smoke, a dark silhouette burst through the fire from the ground floor. Derek. He wore only a grey PT tank top, his face blackened with soot, his eyes wide and wild as he scanned the corridor. I tried to lift my arm. I tried to make a sound. Yet his gaze swept right past my collapsed body, locking instantly onto the far corner of the hallway— He lunged forward, scooped the trembling military dog into his arms, spun on his heel, and sprinted back down the burning stairs. From start to finish, he never once looked down at the floor where I lay. I watched his broad back vanish down the blazing stairwell, and a soundless laugh bubbled past my soot-covered lips. I laughed until tears cut clean tracks through the ash on my cheeks. He had run into the fire to save a dog. In Derek Brooks’s ledger, my life didn’t even rank above a retired Malinois. I bit down hard on my tongue until the metallic taste of blood cleared the fog in my skull. Dragging my dead weight across the floorboards, I clawed my way to the master bedroom window and shoved the sash upward. Freezing rain and wind slammed into my face. Below, in the muddy driveway, Derek had just emerged from the roaring flames. Natalie instantly threw herself into his chest, weeping hysterically. “I was so terrified!” she sobbed, clutching his tactical shirt. “We brought Bolt home from the kennel together… if he died, our last memory would be gone…” Derek’s frame was rigid. For a second, he seemed frozen, but then his hand rose and patted her trembling back. “He’s fine. It’s over.” I gripped the wet sill with both hands and pitched myself out into the dark. The sickening impact with the frozen boxwood hedges was immediately drowned out by the sharp, wet snap of bone. As blinding agony detonated through my spine and hip, I saw Derek violently whip his head toward the bushes. “Nora—!!!” The expression that contorted his face was something I had never seen in seven years of knowing him: pure, unadulterated horror. I looked at him through the rain. I parted my lips to say something, but all that came up was a warm, heavy mouthful of blood. The world went pitch black. When consciousness returned, my senses were flooded with the sterile, chemical bite of surgical antiseptic. I shifted slightly, and a white-hot spike of pain shot through my fractured pelvis and ribs, making me gasp. “Nora!” Derek’s voice cracked beside the bed. He was sitting in a vinyl chair, his eyes sunken, shadowed with dark purple circles. His stubble was wild and uneven, his dress uniform wrinkled and reeking of burnt wood. He reached out, his calloused hand trembling as he covered mine. His palm was burning hot. “You’re awake? God, Nora… where does it hurt?” I pulled my hand back, sliding it under the thin hospital sheet. His fingers remained suspended in the empty air, freezing in place. “Nora, the smoke was at zero visibility,” he rushed to explain, his voice hoarse, desperate. “I saw the open window downstairs. I swear to God I thought you had already evacuated. That’s why I grabbed Bolt first.” He leaned in, his jaw working frantically. “If you were still upstairs, why didn’t you scream for me?” I stared past his broad shoulder, looking at the sterile white acoustic tiles of the hospital ceiling. “Because,” I said, my voice dry as parchment, “I don’t expect anything from you anymore.” I turned my head slowly to meet his bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t expect you to save me. I didn’t expect you to choose me. And I certainly don’t expect you to love me.” Derek recoiled as if a 7.62mm round had torn through his sternum. He staggered back a half-step, his throat working soundlessly. Before he could form a word, his tactical comm unit squawked on an encrypted frequency. Natalie’s contact code flashed on the screen. Derek turned his back to me to answer. I couldn’t hear her voice, but I saw the muscles along his jaw coil tighter and tighter until the corded tendons in his neck looked ready to snap. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I’ll be right there,” he murmured into the receiver. He clicked off the line and walked back to the edge of the bed, his mouth opening, trapped in an agonizing hesitation. “Go,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “I’m a credentialed military surgeon. I know how to read my own charts.” He lingered in the heavy silence for a few seconds. Then, the heavy tread of his combat boots faded down the hallway. During my two weeks of recovery, Derek returned three times. Each visit, he brought high-grade military nutrient supplements and dried field wildflowers. And each visit, before thirty minutes had elapsed, his encrypted comms would buzz, and he would be called away. I didn’t argue. I didn’t ask questions. Whatever he said, I simply answered with a flat, polite nod. The day I was cleared for discharge happened to fall on our fifth wedding anniversary. Perhaps out of some desperate impulse to balance his internal scales, Derek reserved a private dining suite at the base officers’ club. He filled the long mahogany table with fresh gardenias and even managed to secure a framed, rare presentation set of UN Peacekeeping campaign ribbons—the very deployment I had surrendered for him years ago. Looking at the polished brass and silk ribbon, my pulse didn’t jump by a single beat. Midway through the dinner, I stepped out onto the tenth-floor terrace to get some cold air. After a few minutes of watching the distant runway lights, the terrace door clicked open. Natalie stepped out. She wore a tailored white wool coat, her chin lifted in that familiar, hereditary arrogance. “Derek invited me to celebrate,” she said, leaning against the stone balustrade. “He told me tonight was an important milestone.” She tilted her head, a venomous smile curving her lips. “Tell me, Nora… do you actually think you’re important to him?” I leaned against the railing and said nothing. She took two steps closer, dropping her voice to a vicious purr: “He spent an hour standing outside my quarters in the freezing rain last night just because I told him I was having an anxiety flare-up.” “Natalie,” I interrupted, turning to look at her dead-on. “Do you have any idea how loud you are? And how utterly pathetic? You’re like a spoiled toddler throwing tantrums in the aisle because someone else picked up a toy you threw in the trash. Whatever wreckage exists between Derek and me is our business. But you?” I let out a soft, dismissive breath. “A woman who lives entirely in the past, who has to harass another man’s wife just to feel relevant… you aren’t worth a single drop of my energy.” “You arrogant bitch!” Natalie’s face twisted in sudden fury. She lunged forward, her hands slamming against my chest with everything she had! The sudden violence shoved me backward over the low balcony rail. As my boots slipped from the wet terrace tile, my combat reflexes fired automatically—my fingers clamped like steel vice grips around her right wrist, dragging her with me! “Ahhh—!” We both pitched violently over the edge. My entire lower body swung out into the freezing void of the tenth floor, anchored only by my single hand locked around Natalie’s arm. Natalie’s torso was pinned hard against the concrete coping, her legs kicking wildly as she shrieked in mortal terror: “Derek! Help me! Derek!” The terrace doors were violently kicked open. A crowd of officers spilled out, Derek at the absolute front. The color drained from his face until he looked like a corpse. “Pull me up first!” Natalie shrieked, tears and mascara washing down her cheeks as she flailed her free arm toward him. “I can’t hold on! I’m slipping!” Derek’s gaze tore across the scene—taking in the white-knuckled grip of my hand, the strain in my shoulders, and Natalie’s hysterical, sobbing face. In the span of a single heartbeat, he made his choice. He threw his body forward over the railing, both hands clamping down hard on Natalie’s outstretched wrist. “Nora, hold on!” he roared, his voice cracking with sheer desperation. “Hold on! The second I pull her over, I’ll grab you!” I looked up into his eyes. And in that howling, high-altitude wind, I smiled at him. Then, I let go. My fingers uncurled. The wind caught my uniform blouse, ballooning the fabric as the night sky rushed upward. Ten stories below, the surface of the base’s tactical emergency water reservoir shattered beneath my falling weight. A violent, freezing explosion of water slammed into my senses, driving the air from my lungs. As the dark, frigid depths pulled me down, I let my eyes drift shut, surrendering completely to the cold. When I opened my eyes again, I was lying in the master bedroom of our quarters on base. My soaked clothes had been replaced with clean cotton pajamas. The cuts along my arms were dressed with fresh butterfly bandages. The room was pitch black, save for the green glow of my tactical smartphone on the nightstand. One unread text from Derek: Nora, Natalie went into severe shock after the fall. I had to transport her to the trauma ward. Rest now. Please don’t do anything reckless. I’ll explain everything when I get back. I will make this up to you. I stared at the phrase make this up to you. A dry, humorless smirk touched my mouth. When a man loves a woman, he never has to keep a ledger of debts. The screen flashed again. A formal notification from the Joint Armed Forces Legal Authority: Major Nora Miller: Your petition for unilateral dissolution of marriage with Major General Derek Brooks has been approved under statutory review. Please report to the classified records annex within 24 hours to execute clearance. Looking at the digital seal, the tension wire that had been wound so tightly in my chest for seven years finally snapped clean. I opened the internal defense intranet and entered my biometric authorization, confirming my immediate deployment to the forward surgical team on the northern border. Two hours later, I was sitting in the cold aluminum bay of the tactical airfield passenger terminal. My phone began to vibrate violently against the bench. Derek’s private number flashed on the screen, over and over. I didn’t answer. The screen lit up continuously, buzzing like an angry hornet against the metal, until I pressed the side button and powered the device down for good. Overhead, the loudspeaker crackled with the boarding sequence: “Flight 402 to Arctic Forward Operating Base, all medical personnel prepare for immediate embarkation.” I hoisted my olive-drab rucksack onto my shoulders and walked up the hydraulic ramp into the belly of the C-130 Hercules. The four turboprops roared to life, shaking the airframe as the heavy transport lifted off the tarmac. Looking through the scratched porthole, I watched the sprawling grid of the garrison shrink into a cluster of tiny, fading embers, until the low-hanging cloud bank swallowed the last trace of the runway. Goodbye, Derek. From this moment on, my life belongs entirely to me.

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1 Ever since my eye surgery, I have been able to see the emotional auras radiating from people. When someone deeply cares about another person, a warm orange glow surrounds them. I saw it when my neighbor returned from a business trip, his entire porch bathed in a passionate, glowing tangerine. I saw it when the old man down the street bought roasted chestnuts for his wife, a faint, tender warmth enveloping his frail shoulders. But my husband, Declan, always emitted a pale, sterile gray. Throughout the months following my surgery, his aura never changed. When he sat by my hospital bed and fed me soup, he was gray. When he fastened a diamond necklace around my neck for our anniversary, he was gray. Even in the dead of night, when our bodies were tangled together and his fingers interlocked with mine, that lifeless ash color remained. I used to convince myself that he was just a stoic man, someone who buried his love deep beneath a calm surface. That was until yesterday, at the welcome home party for my best friend, Sophie. The banquet hall suddenly lost power. Terrified of the dark, Sophie let out a piercing scream from the middle of the crowd. Declan lunged forward without a second thought. He slammed right into me, knocking me hard to the floor, just so he could pull Sophie into his arms. “Don’t be scared. I’ve got you.” In the pitch black of that hall, an explosive, blinding orange light erupted from his body. It was the first time I had ever seen his aura shine so brightly. It looked like it was burning. … “Summer, are you hurt?” The emergency generators kicked in. The lights flickered back on. Every single guest saw Declan half kneeling on the carpet, holding Sophie tightly against his chest. And there I was, crumpled beside a long table two meters away. The skin on my elbow was sliced open, blood dripping steadily down my forearm. My knees had slammed into the unforgiving marble floor, throbbing with a sickening numbness. Declan finally looked away from Sophie and let his gaze land on me. That blinding orange halo around him still had not faded. In seven years, it was the absolute first time I had seen that color on him. It was scorching hot. But it was not for me. Sophie gently pulled out of his embrace and smoothed her hair. “I’m fine, Declan.” She turned to look at me, her tone casually familiar. “You should check on Summer. It looks like she took a bad fall.” Declan stood up and walked toward me. I gripped the edge of the table and slowly forced myself to stand. I did not cry. I did not make a scene. I did not even ask him why he shoved his own wife out of the way. I simply looked at the fading orange light around his shoulders, turned my back on him, and walked out of the hall. “Summer.” Declan caught up to me at the hotel entrance, grabbing my wrist. He frowned at the blood running down my arm. “The power outage was completely unexpected. You know how terrified Sophie is of the dark.” His voice was perfectly level, offering a justification that he clearly believed I should accept without question. He did not bother explaining who he cared about more. He just used the words “you know” to force me back into the box of the understanding, low maintenance wife. I stared at his aura. It had settled back into that familiar, dead gray. “So when you knocked me over, did you know it was me?” Declan froze for a fraction of a second. “It was chaos in there. I couldn’t see anything.” He let go of my wrist and reached into his pocket for his keys. “Summer, the three of us have been friends for years. Let’s not make this ugly over an accident.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and got into the passenger seat without a word. He insisted on taking me to a nearby urgent care. The sharp sting of iodine on my torn skin made me flinch. As the doctor was cleaning the wound, Declan’s phone vibrated. He glanced at the screen and answered immediately. “Declan, I think I left my car keys on one of the tables. Is there any way you could come back?” Sophie’s voice drifted through the speaker, just loud enough for me to hear. Declan looked at me. My arm was still actively bleeding. The gauze wasn’t even taped down yet. “Finish getting patched up,” he said, tossing his credit card onto the small clinical table. “I’ll be right back.” The clinic door swung open and shut. I watched him walk away into the night. I did not ask him to stay. Half an hour later, the doctor finished wrapping my arm. The clinic door opened again. Sophie walked in, holding a steaming cup of coffee and a pharmacy bag. “Summer, please don’t be mad at Declan. He just panicked,” she said, offering me the coffee with an open, guiltless smile. “You know I got stuck in an elevator as a kid. The dark really messes with my head.” I didn’t take the cup. “He definitely panicked.” Sophie smiled, taking a seat next to me. “We’ve all been tight for years. Let’s not let things get weird just because I moved back.” She was not fighting me. She was not acting malicious. She simply placed herself right in the middle of our marriage, assuming she belonged in the “we” just as much as I did. It was late into the night when Declan finally came home after dropping her off. I had already showered and was sitting quietly on the living room sofa. He tossed a small pharmacy bag onto the coffee table. “I got you some scar cream. Stop giving me the cold shoulder.” He took off his jacket, sounding utterly exhausted. “Sophie just got back to the States. Her welcome party turned into a disaster, and she feels terrible about it.” I looked at the suffocating gray light surrounding him. “Declan,” I said softly. “If Sophie was the one bleeding on the floor tonight, would you still tell her to stop giving you the cold shoulder?” His brow furrowed instantly, annoyance flashing across his face. “But that didn’t happen, did it?” He turned and walked toward the master bathroom. “Go to sleep. Stop overthinking things.” The sound of the shower started running. I picked up my phone and opened an email I had received two weeks ago. The subject line read: Acceptance Confirmation for the London Art Restoration Project. My finger hovered over the screen. Without a single ounce of hesitation, I hit confirm. The next morning, I walked into the kitchen. Declan had already made breakfast. He pushed a bowl of sweet vanilla oatmeal toward me. “You lost blood last night. Eat something warm,” he said, taking his seat with a gentle tone. I stared at the steaming bowl and didn’t touch my spoon. I hated sweet oatmeal. The smell of the vanilla made me nauseous. The person who loved vanilla oatmeal was Sophie. I preferred a savory breakfast skillet. We had been married for three years, and he still had no idea what I liked to eat. “Why aren’t you eating?” he asked. “It’s too hot,” I lied, pushing the bowl away. My phone buzzed on the table. Sophie had sent a message to our group chat. “Thanks again for last night, Declan. How is Summer’s arm? Do you guys need me to drop off some painkillers?” I glanced at the screen. It was the old group chat from college that had been dead for three years. The name was still “The Original Trio.” Declan picked up his phone and typed back rapidly. “No need. You’re still jet lagged. Get some rest.” I watched his fingers move across the screen. My bandages hadn’t even been changed yet, but his first priority was making sure she caught up on her sleep. “Let’s eat out tonight.” Declan put his phone down. “Sophie isn’t used to the city anymore. We’ll grab dinner, just the three of us. Make up for the meal we missed last night.” I looked up at him. “Do you know what today is?” Today was my birthday. Declan paused. Not a single ripple of emotion crossed his face. “We can celebrate your birthday another day.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “Sophie’s welcome back dinner is a one time thing.” I sat in silence, watching that pale, dead gray aura envelop him like a stone that could never be warmed. “Okay,” I nodded, standing up from the table. That afternoon, on my way to the restaurant, I opened the group chat. I changed the name from “The Original Trio” to “Declan and His Friend.” The chat went dead silent for a few seconds. Then, Sophie sent a laughing emoji. “Wow Summer, that sounds so formal. We used to be a lot closer than that.” A second later, a private message from Declan popped up on my screen. “Why would you change the group name?” “Sophie just got back. Why are you purposely making things awkward for her?” I typed a single reply. “I’m just making the relationship status accurate.” He didn’t reply. Dinner was at an upscale French bistro. Sophie wore a stunning red dress and sat right next to Declan. When the waiter handed out the wine list, Sophie smiled and looked at me. “Declan used to drink everyone under the table. Do you keep him on a tight leash now, Summer?” I picked up my water glass and took a sip. “He has stomach ulcers. He doesn’t drink hard liquor anymore.” Sophie raised an eyebrow. “Really?” She turned to Declan. “Back in college, you took shots with me until three in the morning and still made it to your morning lecture.” Declan didn’t correct her. He just sliced his steak, a very faint, fond smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “We were young back then.” Right as those words left his lips, a soft, unmistakable layer of orange light shimmered around him. It was faint, but it was incredibly real. I watched that light, and the very last shred of hope in my heart quietly died. Halfway through the meal, I stood up. “I have some restoration files to sort through. I’m heading home.” Declan frowned. “Finish your food. I’ll drive you.” “No need.” I grabbed my purse and walked out without looking back. As I reached the parking lot, I heard footsteps behind me. “Summer.” Sophie was leaning against a parked car, her voice utterly calm. “I know you hate that I’m back.” She pulled out a cigarette and lit it, holding it between her fingers. “But Declan and I knew each other long before you came along. There is a lot of history between us, and you can’t just erase that just because you’re uncomfortable.” I looked at her. “And?” Sophie let out a soft laugh and blew a ring of smoke. “And if you can’t handle it, you should have spoken up sooner. Don’t play the silent martyr and make everyone else miserable.” I stared at her unapologetic face and didn’t bother arguing. When I got home, I opened my laptop. I pulled up the email from the London restoration center and began filling out my visa application. Over the next few days, I quietly started gathering my documents and packing my portfolio. The floor of my home office was covered in specialized tools and historical reference books. When Declan pushed the door open, I was sealing some ancient manuscripts my grandfather had left me into moisture proof bags. His eyes swept over the open suitcase on the floor. He frowned. “Are you going on a business trip?” I zipped the bag shut. “Something like that.” He walked closer, looking like he wanted to ask more, but his phone started ringing in his pocket. His tone softened the second he answered. “You found the venue? Okay, I’m on my way.” He hung up and grabbed his coat from the back of the chair. “Sophie wants to host a small photography exhibition, but there’s a problem with the gallery space.” He looked at me. “I’m going to go help her sort it out. We’ll talk about your trip when I get back.” I didn’t even look up. “Okay.” The moment the front door clicked shut, I shoved the final stack of paperwork into my luggage. He didn’t even have five minutes to hear where I was going. That afternoon, I went to the bank to print out six months of bank statements for my visa application. When the teller handed me the receipt, I froze, staring at the final balance. More than half of the money in our joint savings account the fund we had been building for our trip to Iceland was gone. The transfer note read: Deposit for Sophie’s Gallery Venue. Two years ago, when my vision finally stabilized after the surgery, I told Declan I wanted to see the Northern Lights. He had held my hands, his voice thick with sincerity. “As soon as you’re fully healed, I will take you.” We saved that money for two years. Now, my Northern Lights had been traded in for Sophie’s spotlight. I folded the bank statement, put it in my bag, and hailed a cab to the gallery. The exhibition hall was a mess of scaffolding and workers setting up partitions. I walked inside and immediately noticed the centerpiece in the main glass display. It was an antique film camera. My grandfather’s camera. Next to it, an elegant little placard read: The early inspiration for Sophie’s artistic journey. I stood in front of the glass, my fingers turning icy cold. “Summer? What are you doing here?” Declan walked over with a clipboard, looking completely unbothered. “Sophie is just borrowing it for a few days.” He pointed at the camera. “Your grandfather kept it in great condition. It fits the vintage theme of the exhibition perfectly.” I turned my head to look at him. “Did you even think to ask me?” Declan went silent for a moment, rolling up the blueprints in his hand. “Do we really need to draw such harsh lines between what’s yours and what’s mine?” His tone held a hint of reprimand, as if I were being entirely unreasonable. Sophie climbed down from a nearby ladder, dusting off her hands. “Summer, perfect timing!” She walked over, her smile bright and easy. “I was just about to text you. Your grandpa’s camera has such a beautiful aesthetic. It’s exactly what this display needed.” I stared right through her. “That belongs to me.” Sophie blinked, then her smile grew wider. “Of course it does. I’m not keeping it.” She glanced at Declan. “Declan said you wouldn’t mind, so I went ahead and used it.” Declan stepped forward, physically placing himself between me and Sophie. “Summer, it is just a camera. You’ll get it back when the show is over.” He dropped his voice, leaning in. “This exhibition is a huge deal for Sophie’s return. Do not embarrass her right now.” I looked at the suffocating, dead ash gray radiating from his body. “Declan,” I said, my voice eerily calm. “Let’s get a divorce.” His face drained of color, his eyes turning dark and sharp. “Over a camera?” He looked at me like I had lost my mind. “Leave Sophie out of this. It wasn’t easy for her to move back here and start over. We have all been friends for years. There is no need to nuke our marriage just because you’re feeling sensitive.” I didn’t argue. I reached past him, slid open the unlocked glass door of the display cabinet, and took my grandfather’s camera. Then I turned around and walked out. It was raining lightly on the opening day of Sophie’s exhibition. I had zero intention of going, but I realized I was missing a crucial document for my visa. Declan had absentmindedly stuffed it into his briefcase two days ago. I had no choice but to go find him. When I walked into the lobby, Declan was standing near the guest book. He looked surprised to see me, his hand instinctively reaching out to touch my shoulder. I stepped sideways, avoiding him completely. His hand froze in midair, then dropped back to his side. “Since you’re here, do you want to walk through the gallery together?” His aura was still that sickening, pale gray. I shook my head and started looking for his briefcase. But my eyes were drawn to a massive projector screen near the entrance. The title read: Reunion The Ten Years We Walked Together. I froze in my tracks. The video showed a sprawling lavender field in Provence. Sophie was running ahead, looking over her shoulder and laughing at the camera. Declan was walking beside her, carrying her heavy equipment bag. The golden hour sun stretched their shadows together across the grass. The next clip was by the Seine River. Twilight. They were leaning against the stone bridge. Sophie rested her head on his shoulder, watching the sunset. Declan leaned down and whispered something. She laughed, swatting his chest playfully, and he smiled back. The next shot was outside a small street cafe. Sophie was shivering, blowing on her hands. Declan took off his trench coat the one I bought for his birthday last year and draped it over her shoulders. In the bottom right corner, there were date stamps. October 15th, 17th, 20th. I remembered those days vividly. I had been stuck in bed with a brutal fever. “The fifteenth,” I said, my voice completely flat. “Weren’t you supposed to be on a business trip in Chicago?” Declan went dead silent. “Sophie was stuck overseas by herself. She didn’t speak the language well. I just flew out to help her.” His aura remained a lifeless gray. The lights in the gallery dimmed, signaling the start of the opening ceremony. Sophie stood on the small stage in a flowing white dress, smiling softly into the microphone. “Before we begin, I want to invite someone very special up here.” Her eyes cut through the crowd and landed straight on my husband. “Declan, come stand with me.” Declan walked up the steps. The spotlight hit them both. And then, I saw it. The moment he stood next to her, the gray aura around him fractured. A vibrant, warm orange light bled through the cracks, growing brighter by the second. He didn’t even have to do anything. Just standing next to her made him light up. Sophie tilted her head to look at him, then turned back to the audience, her voice dripping with affection. “This exhibition would not exist without this man.” “From choosing the theme, to booking the venue, to hauling equipment around he was there for every single step.” “When a torrential downpour ruined our shooting schedule in Paris, he walked the streets with me for hours just to find new locations.” She paused, her voice dropping to a whisper. “When I broke down crying at four in the morning, I made one phone call, and he was at my door in twenty minutes.” “Without Declan, there would be no Reunion today.” The applause was deafening. The orange light around him flared even brighter. A reporter in the front row raised his hand. “Sophie, care to clarify your relationship with Declan? If you told us you two were married, we’d believe it.” The crowd cheered and whistled. Declan shifted his weight and raised the microphone. “We are actually just” Sophie suddenly leaned into his side and whispered something. It looked a lot like: Declan, please, just this once. The media is here, I need the hype. Summer won’t mind. She looked up at him, her eyes crinkling with a sweet smile. Declan stopped talking. He didn’t nod, but he didn’t finish his sentence, either. Sophie turned to the crowd, flashing a radiant smile. “Since everyone is so curious… Declan is definitely much more than just a friend to me!” The room erupted. Camera flashes turned the hall blinding white. Sophie turned to him, reaching her hand out until her fingertips brushed against the back of his hand. He looked down at it. One second. Two seconds. He didn’t pull away. She slid her fingers through his, interlocking them completely. The warm orange light surrounding him exploded into a raging fire, so bright it practically flooded the room. The crowd went wild. “They are perfect for each other!” “Is this the official hard launch?” I stood in the back of the room, looking up at the two beautiful, glowing auras blending perfectly together on stage. They really were a perfect match. My phone buzzed in my pocket. “Miss Bennett, your car to the airport is waiting outside.” I turned around, slipped through the crowd, found his briefcase on a side table, and pulled out my visa document. The blistering orange light continued to shine behind me, but none of it had anything to do with me anymore. Walking out of the gallery, the rain was coming down harder than before. “Let’s go,” I told the driver. As the car merged onto the highway, I leaned my head against the cool glass, watching the raindrops slide down like tears. My phone screen lit up. It was a text from Declan: “Where did you go?” I stared at it for a few seconds, then powered off my phone. The airport was quiet. I printed my boarding pass, checked my luggage, and walked through security. The intercom echoed overhead. “Flight 482 to London is now boarding.” I stood up, grabbed my carry-on, and walked toward the gate. Goodbye, Declan.

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1 Five years after I walked away from Harrison Cole, I flew back to San Francisco for an architectural retrospective. I was at the baggage carousel at SFO when a venture capitalist who had shared my first-class row from Munich recognized me. His voice carried that distinct Silicon Valley frequency—part genuine reverence, part opportunistic regret. “Audrey Shaw, right?” He offered a manicured hand, his smile tight with envy. “I still kick myself for passing on the seed round for Daybreak Studios back in the day. What you and Harrison built straight out of college was nothing short of miraculous.” I took his hand, offering a practiced, neutral nod. “Thank you. That feels like a lifetime ago.” “And then Apex Technologies swooped in,” he continued, leaning in as if sharing privileged market gossip. “The holy grail. Word around Sand Hill Road was that Apex wanted Harrison’s core generative framework so badly they wrote an unprecedented dual-partner executive track into the acquisition term sheet. One seat for him, one guaranteed for his co-founder. Everyone in the valley knew that second desk was yours.” He chuckled warmly. “Power couple of the decade. I take it congratulations are in order by now? You two must be married.” A dull, familiar ache settled beneath my ribs, like an old fracture predicting rain. Years ago, everyone in our studio had been just as certain as this stranger. The champagne had been chilling on ice in our converted warehouse loft in SoMa. Our team had already engraved matching walnut desk plates for the new executive suite. Yet on the morning the ink dried on the Apex merger, the woman standing beside Harrison at the press podium—wearing an ivory silk blouse that caught the flashbulbs—was our junior intern, Natalie Ward. Afterward, in the glass-walled conference room that smelled of dry-erase markers and damp eucalyptus from the courtyard, Harrison had held my wrists with trembling, earnest hands. “Natalie needs the institutional safety net, Audrey. You don’t,” he had pleaded, his voice thick with a patronizing tenderness that made my stomach turn. “Her family is drowning in debt. She needs the visa sponsorship. Your design philosophy is pure art—it’s too visionary, too uncompromising. Apex’s corporate board will only suffocate your voice.” He had pulled a glossy brochure from his leather portfolio. He had enrolled me in a prestigious, self-directed fellowship at a local private design academy across town, paying the tuition in full. “Go hone your craft without commercial pressure,” he had promised, wrapping his cashmere coat around my shoulders. “The second your program wraps, we’ll get married. I swear it.” I didn’t take the fellowship. I bought a one-way ticket to Berlin, walked away from my equity, and threw myself into the brutal, cold-water current of the European architectural circuit until my hands bled graphite and my lungs forgot how to breathe in his cadence. Standing by the carousel in San Francisco, looking at this venture capitalist who knew only the folklore and none of the wreckage, I smiled faintly. “We broke up a long time ago,” I said, my voice as calm as still water. “Creative differences. It was better for both of us not to hold each other back.” The man’s smile froze into a mask of acute embarrassment. “Oh. I—I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” My phone vibrated in my palm, saving him from his stammering. The screen lit up with a notification from the dispatch driver sent by the gallery. “Excuse me,” I said, sliding my dark sunglasses back over my eyes. “My ride is outside.” I caught the strap of my Rimowa case and walked toward the sliding glass doors into the chilly, salt-scented Bay breeze, deliberately not looking back to see his bewildered expression. Once inside the black town car, I leaned my head against the cool leather headrest and closed my eyes. But the city had already begun its ambush. Harrison Cole. Even now, the name carried the weight of an anchor dropped into deep water. He had been the boy whose initials I etched into the margins of my calculus notebooks during our junior year of high school in Palo Alto. He had been the valedictorian with ink stains on his cuffs and an unshakeable, quiet brilliance that terrified our teachers and intoxicated me. At our graduation bonfire on Half Moon Bay, when the smoke smelled of charred cedar and ocean brine, I had confessed to him with burning cheeks. He hadn’t laughed. He had simply smiled, caught my cold fingers in his, and kissed my forehead while our classmates cheered around the flames. To find out that the person you worshipped in secret had been quietly loving you from the exact same distance felt like winning a cosmic lottery. When we both went to Stanford, our mutual obsession crystallized into Daybreak Studios. The late-night takeouts on the floor of our dorm room; the awards that began piling up on our shared shelf; the seventy-hour sprints where we lived on cold cold-brew and each other’s adrenaline—we built every stone of that enterprise believing it was the foundation of our shared life. Just as everyone had assumed the executive partner seat at Apex belonged to me. Except when the future finally arrived, I wasn’t his partner. And I was no longer his girl. The drive into downtown felt endless, every highway exit dredging up a memory I thought I had buried beneath layers of German concrete. As the car pulled up to the curb of the hotel on Nob Hill, my phone rang. The caller ID displayed a familiar name, and my chest instantly unknotted. Marcus. “Have you checked in yet?” His voice came through the receiver, low and gravelly, colored with the gentle warmth of an afternoon in Munich. “How was the landing? Did the turbulence over the Rockies shake you up?” “Just pulling up to the hotel now,” I said, letting out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “The flight was fine.” A beat of silence stretched across the satellite connection. Marcus knew me too well. “You sound quiet, Audrey. What happened?” That was the thing about Marcus Bennett. He never missed a tremor in my voice. In the four years we had shared a life, he had never once asked me to perform strength when I was tired. “Nothing serious,” I murmured, watching the doorman approach the car. “Just the jet lag catching up to me. The city feels… loud.” “Then take a hot bath, order room service, and sleep,” Marcus said softly. “Don’t let them run you ragged before the opening night.” “I will. I promise.” “I love you,” he added, the words easy and solid, like an oak beam holding up a roof. “I love you too.” After unpacking, I lay on the king-sized bed, staring at the ornate molding on the ceiling. The time change clawed at my temples, making sleep impossible. Just as dusk began painting the skyline in shades of bruised violet, my phone buzzed again. It was Sadie Wells. She had been our most talented junior architect at Daybreak, a girl two years behind us who had remained my fiercest defender long after I left the country. “Audrey!” Sadie shrieked through the speaker the second I picked up. “You’re in town and you didn’t tell me? I literally just saw a photo of you on the alumni tech board!” “The tech board?” “Yes! Some VC posted a candid shot of you at SFO with your sunglasses on. The thread is completely out of control!” I opened my laptop, navigating to the private network our university cohort still used for industry gossip. Sure enough, right at the top of the feed was a high-res photo of me by the baggage claim, captioned: “The original queen of Daybreak Studios is back in the Bay. Confirmed in the flesh.” The comments section was moving faster than a trading floor: —Even behind Tom Ford shades, Audrey Shaw still looks like royalty. —Wait, is she alone? Where’s Harrison Cole? —The original poster said she was completely solo. —Are you guys living under a rock? They broke up years ago right after graduation! —Bullshit. They were the gold standard of Stanford engineering. Harrison worshipped the ground she walked on. What the hell happened? Someone spill the tea! I shut the laptop with a sharp snap. There it was again. No matter how many international design biennials I curated, no matter how many European monographs bore only my name, my identity in this valley was still tethered to Harrison Cole by an invisible, suffocating cord. A text from Sadie popped up on my phone: Where are you staying? Please let me take you to dinner. I need to hug you. I hesitated, but Sadie was one of the few people whose loyalty had never wavered. I sent her the address of the restaurant adjacent to the hotel. I had no idea that fate, in its cruelest, most theatrical humor, had booked Harrison Cole into a private rehearsal dinner in the very same establishment that evening. Sadie arrived in a blur of camel wool and bright laughter, throwing her arms around my neck the moment she reached my table in the courtyard lounge. “Look at you!” she gasped, pulling back to inspect my face. “You look chic, untouchable, and disgustingly European. God, I missed you.” She rattled on over our appetizers, catching me up on the mutual acquaintances who had sold out to big tech and the ones who had washed out. But halfway through her second glass of Pinot Noir, her expression softened into something heavy with melancholy. “You know Professor Adler still talks about you,” Sadie said quietly, tracing the rim of her wine glass. “She was devastated when you turned down that open fellowship offer from Omni Labs years ago. She told the entire department that you had a once-in-a-generation eye. She couldn’t understand why you gave it all up for Harrison…” Sadie stopped abruptly. Her fork suspended in midair, her eyes widening as she stared at something over my left shoulder. The air in the courtyard seemed to drop ten degrees. I turned slowly. Ten feet away, emerging from the private dining annex, stood a man in bespoke navy wool. His Italian leather oxfords gleamed under the amber patio lights. His dark hair was cut with severe precision, the soft, boyish curls of our college years ironed out into ruthless executive polish. Harrison Cole. Six years. He had shed every trace of the unkempt, idealistic boy who used to fall asleep with his head on my lap while our rendering programs compiled. In his place stood a titan of industry—austere, impeccably composed, radiating that cold, impenetrable authority that billions of dollars in valuation grant a man. Yet when his dark eyes caught mine, that manufactured armor cracked instantly. His pupils dilated, his breath hitching audibly in the quiet space. The walkway between our tables shrank into a suffocating vacuum. “Harrison, darling, everyone is seated. They’re waiting for your toast.” A soft, melodic voice broke the silence. Natalie Ward stepped out from behind him, her petite frame wrapped in an understated cream cashmere dress. Her diamond studs caught the light. When Natalie looked up and saw me, the polite society smile vanished from her face. Her throat convulsed. “Aud… Audrey?” Her voice carried an unmistakable shudder of panic. I looked at her, and an unexpected wave of pity washed over me. She had spent six years walking in my shoes, occupying the seat I had designed, standing beside the man she had coveted. She had won every single prize she set out to claim. Why was she still trembling like a thief caught in the foyer? If that VC from the airport were standing here now, I would have told him: You see? She was the one who went to Apex. She was the one who took the partner seat. Before I turned twenty-one, everyone in our circle operated under a universal law: where Audrey Shaw went, Harrison Cole followed like gravity. In his very first solo software architecture release, he had hidden my birthdate in the source code as an encrypted easter egg. At every design gala, before he acknowledged our venture backers or our lead engineers, his first words into the microphone were always, “None of this exists without Audrey.” Whenever I hit a creative wall, sitting on the floor surrounded by crumpled vellum, he would appear without a word, set a fresh strawberry tart and an iced Americano beside my drawing board, and pull all-nighters just cross-referencing structural specs so I wouldn’t have to break my flow. Until sophomore year, when Natalie Ward transferred into our lab as a work-study intern. She was quiet at first, almost invisible. But during a mid-semester project review, she presented an interaction framework that bore a terrifying, uncanny resemblance to Harrison’s conceptual style. “Audrey, her sketches look like Harrison drew them in his sleep,” Sadie had warned me back then over greasy campus burgers. “Aren’t you worried she’s trying to study your playbook?” I had laughed it off. “Harrison and I have a decade of history. Nobody steps into that overnight.” How young I was. How spectacularly arrogant. Slowly, imperceptibly, Natalie’s name became a fixture in Harrison’s vocabulary. She was the one who offered an alternative logic tree when a client rejected our proposal; she was the one whose database design cleared the technical review an hour before Harrison’s; she was the co-author on the regional tech grant that won them gold while I took silver in solo design. Daybreak hung celebratory banners across the loft for weeks. I watched it happen in slow motion, convincing myself that professional synergy had nothing to do with intimacy. Until the end of our senior year, when Harrison came to me and said he wanted to sell Daybreak to Apex. Even though we were already fighting constantly about Natalie’s encroaching presence, I had swallowed my pride and backed him completely. “If that’s where your ambition is, I’ll help you carry it across the line.” Only later did I discover that Apex had never been Harrison’s dream. It had been Natalie’s. She had an obsession with their corporate ecosystem since high school. And when Apex offered that coveted dual-partner seat, Harrison came to my apartment, looked me in the eye, and asked me to surrender my half of our company’s legacy so Natalie wouldn’t be left behind. “Natalie needs this position far more than you do,” he had said. “Let her have it.” Now, standing on the flagstones of Nob Hill, Natalie instinctively reached out and hooked her slender hand around Harrison’s forearm. It was an unmistakable gesture—a desperate, territorial staking of a claim. “Audrey,” Natalie breathed, forcing a polite tilt to her chin. “When did you get back to the States? You didn’t give anyone a heads-up.” I had lived in Germany for half a decade, but I wasn’t deaf. I knew what the industry whispered about them. They were Apex’s golden duo. They shared patents, shared stage time at tech summits, shared an elite reputation as soulmates forged in silicon. How hollow it all looked up close. I remembered what Natalie had whispered to me in the studio kitchen on the night before I left for Europe: “You only have Harrison because you were there first. If we started from the exact same starting line in the real corporate world, you wouldn’t stand a chance.” Sadie stepped forward, putting herself between me and the couple. Her eyes shot daggers at Natalie. “And who exactly are you to Audrey?” Sadie snapped. “Why on earth would she report her itinerary to you?” Natalie’s face drained of color. She tugged at Harrison’s sleeve, clearly waiting for him to step in, to deploy his razor-sharp eloquence and shield her the way he always had. But Harrison was entirely numb. He stood there like a hollow marble statue, his gaze locked onto my face with an agonizing, unblinking intensity. He didn’t even flinch when Natalie pulled on his coat. “This is toxic,” Sadie muttered, grabbing my wrist. “Come on, Audrey. We’re changing places.” We paid our tab and moved to a quiet bistro four blocks away. Yet Harrison Cole’s obsession proved far more reckless than either of us anticipated. Halfway through our dinner, I glanced out the tall front windows of the bistro. Parked directly across the street under the glow of a streetlamp was a slate-gray Porsche. I recognized the license plate instantly. It was our old anniversary. October 14th. Through the tinted windshield, I could see his silhouette. He sat motionless behind the steering wheel, his face pale in the dashboard light, staring across the wet pavement directly into the restaurant. Staring at me with an expression so drenched in grief and yearning it bordered on madness. A flare of cold fury ignited in my chest. I excused myself from the table, pushed through the heavy glass doors of the bistro, and marched across the street. The San Francisco fog was rolling in, cold and sharp against my bare throat. I tapped my knuckles sharply against the driver’s side glass. Harrison hit the button. The window slid down smoothly. When he looked up at me, his eyes were bloodshot, the rims raw and inflamed. “Audrey,” he choked out, his voice cracking like dry wood. “How can you be this cruel?” A tear spilled over his lower lash line, tracking down his hollow cheek. Harrison Cole was crying. My mind involuntarily flashed back to our senior year, to an off-site corporate mixer where a senior executive from a prospective client had cornered me near the terrace, running a hand down my bare shoulder under the guise of discussing our render pipelines. Harrison had crossed the ballroom like a tempest. He didn’t use corporate tact; he didn’t protect our firm’s future. He had slammed our physical presentation deck onto the glass coffee table with such violence the tempered glass shattered. When the executive’s boss demanded an immediate apology on threat of blacklisting Daybreak from the entire venture network, Harrison had stood over them, snarling like a feral animal: “You want an apology? If anyone ever uses business leverage to touch Audrey Shaw again, I will burn your firm to the ground.” He had been barred from the university lab for two months. When I went to his apartment the next day, I found him curled on his futon, trembling from the adrenaline crash, tears soaking his pillow. When I cried for him, asking if destroying his early career was worth it, he had pulled me into his arms, kissing away my salt: “Always worth it. Don’t ever ask me that again.” Even in his darkest hour, he had never wept out of self-pity. Yet here he was now, weeping because I had dared to exist without him for six years. He thought my absence was a punishment inflicted upon him, rather than a survival instinct that had saved my life. “Cruel?” I repeated, my voice devoid of temperature. “I haven’t thought about you in years, Harrison.” “Six years,” he whispered, his chest heaving beneath his tailored suit. “Not a single email. Not a postcard. Everyone thought you were throwing a tantrum. I thought… I thought you’d come home.” I remembered the afternoon before I boarded my flight. He had tracked me down at my packed apartment, desperately offering another compromise: “Audrey, I’ve already reached out to an elite design institute in France. We can arrange your placement there. We can still work together across borders. The moment your courses end, we’ll get married. Okay?” He had known how terrified I was of losing him, because back then, I loved him with every fiber of my being. But youthful love does not survive betrayal. I looked at him now. The boy on the Half Moon Bay beach was dead. The man in front of me was a stranger wearing a ghost’s eyes, trapped in a tragic narrative of his own manufacturing. I felt no rage. I felt no lingering heartbreak. Only an overwhelming, suffocating exhaustion. I stepped back from the car and raised a hand toward the hotel doorman standing under the awning fifty feet away. “Excuse me,” I called out clearly. The doorman jogged over, his eyes darting between my designer coat and the distressed man in the idling sports car. “Yes, ma’am? Everything all right?” “This vehicle has been following me since downtown,” I said calmly. “He is loitering and harassing me. Please ensure he does not disturb me any further.” The doorman’s posture hardened. He stepped directly between Harrison’s window and me, resting a hand on his radio. “Sir, you need to turn the ignition and move along. Right now.” Harrison stared at me through the gap between the doorman’s shoulders, his face a portrait of utter devastation. I didn’t offer him another second. I turned on my heel and walked away. Three days later, I took a car down to Palo Alto to visit Professor Adler at the Stanford design labs. The older woman looked frail in her signature oversized linen smock, but her eyes were as sharp as diamonds. She took both of my hands in hers, squeezing them until her silver rings dug into my skin. “Audrey,” she murmured, her voice trembling with emotion. “Look at you. Tell me you’re still designing. Tell me you didn’t let that Silicon Valley corporate nonsense extinguish your gift.” “I never stopped, Professor,” I said gently. “Not for a single day.” I reached into my leather tote and withdrew a heavy, matte-black exhibition card embossed with silver typography. I placed it in her hands. “I came back because Omni Technologies invited me to host my solo retrospective.” Professor Adler looked down. Her breath caught in her throat. “Omni Technologies?” she read aloud, her voice climbing in disbelief. “A solo architectural and spatial design retrospective? Your solo retrospective?” She read the card line by line, her shock slowly melting into profound, maternal pride. Tears welled in the old woman’s eyes. She pressed the card against her chest, her shoulders shaking with quiet relief. “I knew it,” she wept softly, wiping a stray tear with the back of her sleeve. “When you walked away from Daybreak, when you refused to go to Omni all those years ago because of Harrison Cole… I was terrified you were sacrificing your life for his ambition. I spent years mourning what you could have been. And look at you. You fought your way back to the very top on your own terms.” “You were always my compass,” I said, feeling a prick of moisture in my own eyes. “I will be there on opening night,” she promised fiercely. She looked at me closely, tilting her head. “Your line work… the drafts in your European catalogs. They’re different, Audrey. Stronger. There is a profound stillness in your structures now.” I smiled softly, thinking of the quiet, sun-drenched flat in Munich and the man who waited for me there. “It’s exactly what you think, Professor.” She nodded knowingly, squeezing my hands one last time. “Congratulations, my dear. Truly.” When the cab dropped me back at the Nob Hill hotel late that afternoon, the head concierge stepped out from behind the mahogany desk, his face lined with polite concern. “Ms. Shaw? May I have a brief word?” I paused by the elevator bank. “Yes?” He pointed discreetly toward the glass entrance. “That gentleman is back again.”

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1 I have a hereditary fat metabolism disorder. Overeat slightly, and my weight and blood sugar spiral out of control. After diagnosis, my best friend Wendy quit sweets and fried foods with me so I could look perfect for my wedding. My fiancé Hank was deeply moved. Three days before the wedding, Hank said, “We’re at the finish line. I’m taking Wendy out for a cheat meal tonight. What are you craving, Wendy?” My fork of plain chicken breast froze mid-air. He asked her, not me. Wendy squealed, hugging my arm. “Sushi! The expensive kind!” Hank chuckled. “You got it, little glutton.” He turned to me. “Tracy, your dress is a size smaller. I’ll take you for spicy hotpot after the wedding. I need to compensate Wendy first for suffering through this diet with you.” I lowered my head. The dry chicken tasted like cardboard. He gave Wendy all the credit and rewards, while I got all the discipline and sacrifice. Throughout my diet, he never encouraged me once. He only pitied her. Wendy grabbed Hank’s hand, pulling him toward the door. “Let’s run there so we can eat even more! Catch us, Tracy!” I stayed put until they disappeared down the street. My eyes drifted to the snowboard shop on the corner. For months, I’d talked about wanting to go snowboarding. But I wanted hotpot right now. And I didn’t want to wait until the honeymoon to snowboard either. … I was picking up my third snowboard when Hank finally called me. When I answered, it was Wendy’s voice coming through the speaker. “Tracy, we already started eating! What’s taking you so long?” Before I could even respond, she flipped the camera around. The screen showed Hank, meticulously peeling a shrimp with absolute patience. “Don’t worry, Tracy! Your fiancé is taking amazing care of me!” Hank looked down with a soft smile, handing her the peeled shrimp with practiced ease. We had been together for seven years. He had never peeled a shrimp for me. I carried the snowboard toward the checkout counter. “I’m not coming. You guys enjoy yourselves.” The line went dead silent for a second. Wendy flipped the camera back to herself. “What’s wrong, Tracy? Are you mad?” She chewed loudly as she spoke. I looked away from the screen and handed the board to the cashier. “Hi, I’ll take this one, please.” Wendy choked slightly on her food. The camera shook violently before the phone was handed back to Hank. “Tracy?” I waited until the cashier started ringing up the board before looking back at the screen. Hank lowered his voice into a hushed, reprimanding tone. “Stop throwing a tantrum at Wendy. She completely lost her appetite because of you. “If you’re not coming, just go home early. We’ll talk tonight. “I promised you I’d never let you go to sleep angry.” My fingers paused. I thought, maybe I could give him one last chance. “Alright. Buy me that snowsuit I’ve been asking for, and we’ll talk.” I left the shop’s shipping address with the cashier and hailed a cab to the university district. When I stepped out, snow had started falling from the dark sky. I pushed the door of the hotpot shop open. “Auntie Martha, the usual, please.” Auntie Martha walked out of the kitchen with a warm, wrinkled smile. “Tracy! What a surprise. Where’s Hank today?” I looked away. “He’s busy.” Auntie Martha didn’t notice my tone and started expertly tossing my favorite vegetables into the boiling broth. “I heard that after your old boss ran off, you two started your own design firm! So young and successful. I’m so proud of you both.” I forced a smile and pulled a wedding invitation out of my purse. Auntie Martha froze for a second before wiping her hands on her apron, her face breaking into a huge, delighted grin. “Oh my goodness! Congratulations! I will absolutely be there. I need to get you two a massive red envelope!” I quickly waved my hands. “Just bring yourself, Auntie. You helped us so much back then. Hank and I are incredibly grateful.” In college, Hank and I survived purely on student loans and part-time jobs. At the end of every month, when we were completely broke, we would come here and order the cheapest vegetarian combo. Over time, Auntie Martha memorized our faces. Eventually, we started finding extra slices of meat hidden at the bottom of our bowls. Just as I finished eating and stood up to leave, the front door swung open. I came face to face with Hank. Behind him was Wendy, draped in a brand-new, luxurious wool coat. The moment she walked in, her eyes grew red and teary. “Tracy, if you didn’t want sushi, why didn’t you just say so?” She looked around the tiny, rundown shop with blatant disgust. “Why would you come to a place like this? It’s so unsanitary.” Auntie Martha, who had just started walking over to greet them, froze dead in her tracks, completely humiliated. My face instantly hardened. Hank’s jaw tightened. Seeing Wendy open her mouth to complain again, he quickly grabbed her arm. I took a deep breath, turned to Auntie Martha, and apologized profusely, begging her not to take the insult to heart. Then, I grabbed Wendy by the arm and dragged her outside. She immediately started shrieking. “Let go of me, Tracy! This coat is brand new! It’s handmade! You’re ruining it!” I forcefully shoved her away. Before I could even open my mouth, Hank cut me off. “Enough, Tracy. Wendy isn’t wrong.” My lungs completely stopped working. “What did you just say?” Hank sighed and stepped between us, deliberately shielding her from me. “I mean, we have a different status now. Coming back to a dump like this is degrading.” The cold winter air fell into an absolute, suffocating silence. I slowly looked up and met his eyes. I couldn’t recognize the man looking back at me anymore. I slowly shook my head. “A dump like this? Hank, did you forget how you survived those years?” Hank’s brow furrowed in irritation. “I haven’t forgotten. But people need to move on and leave the past behind, don’t they?” I stood frozen on the sidewalk. Wendy suddenly let out a delicate sneeze. Hank instantly spun around, unscrewing the thermos he had been holding the entire time. “Here, drink some hot water quickly.” When he turned back to me, his tone had shifted to pure impatience. “Tracy, stop being so dramatic, okay?” I pointed a shaking finger at my own chest. “I’m being dramatic?” “Aren’t you? Wendy and I went home, and you weren’t there. Your phone was off. We were losing our minds with worry. “Wendy has been freezing out here for an hour trying to find you, and this is how you treat her?” I opened my mouth, but it felt like a soaked sponge had been shoved down my throat. I couldn’t utter a single syllable. Hank and I did owe Wendy. When we first started our firm, nobody wanted to hire two fresh graduates. We were on the verge of bankruptcy. Wendy convinced her wealthy father to pull some strings and get us into a massive bidding war. That was the only reason we survived. Ever since that day, Hank treated Wendy like royalty. He catered to her every whim. But whenever she left, he would bury his face in my neck, groaning in exhaustion. “Tracy, networking is so exhausting.” He used to raise his hand and swear to me. “I promise, I’m just buttering up the client! I’m doing this all for the company!” I used to laugh at how dramatic he was. But when exactly did Hank turn this “networking” into a genuine obsession? Maybe it was the first time he practically begged to drive her home. Maybe it was during my business trips, when they started going out for private dinners, night after night. When I finally caught them, he looked at me with that tired, condescending expression. “The only reason we have this lifestyle is because of her. I am just fulfilling my duty as a businessman to keep the client happy. Stop being so paranoid.” Suddenly, a freezing gust of wind ripped down the street, and my body shivered uncontrollably. Hank’s face instantly changed. He rushed forward, grabbing my hands, letting out a sharp gasp. “Why are your hands so cold?” He frantically breathed hot air into his palms, rubbing my hands vigorously, trying to transfer his body heat to me. Deep down in my chest, a pathetic, stupid sliver of warmth flared back to life. “Hank.” I forced a tight smile. “Did you buy the snowsuit I wanted?” Hank’s hands stopped moving. “Tracy,” he said, glancing back at Wendy for a split second. “You don’t actually need that snowsuit right now, do you?” I froze. “What?” Wendy immediately rushed forward and linked her arm through mine. “Come on, Tracy! You’re not going snowboarding tomorrow, right? “After we finished our sushi, we walked past this designer coat boutique. I made Hank go in with me.” She smiled, looking incredibly pleased with herself. “He kept saying everything looked perfect on me. He gave absolutely zero constructive feedback!” Hank looked up at the sky, laughing helplessly. “That’s because you were the model. Everything looks good on you.” He turned back to me, the fond smile still lingering on his lips. Before he could speak, I violently ripped my hands out of his grip. “So,” I stared dead into his eyes. “Something I’ve been begging for was cast aside for her impulsive shopping trip. Again. Right?” Hank’s brow snapped together in instant frustration. Wendy looked confused for a second before her face hardened with offense. “Excuse me? What did I even do?” Hank’s voice immediately turned harsh and protective, exactly like a boyfriend defending his girl from an attack. “Tracy, I don’t understand you. “Why are you throwing a fit right now? Even if I bought it, you wouldn’t use it until we go on our honeymoon, right?” Wendy pouted her lips, nodding in aggressive agreement. Hank kept going. “If you keep acting like this, I’m just going to take Wendy snowboarding instead and leave you at home.” I looked at him, pronouncing every single word with absolute clarity. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t need you to take me.” Hank blinked, caught off guard. “What does that mean?” I took a breath. “It means the wedding is off.” The second those words left my mouth, both of their faces morphed into pure shock. Wendy jumped backward. “Tracy, are you out of your mind? You’re ruining your wedding over a coat?!” Hank just stared deeply into my eyes. “You’re doing this over a cheat meal? Or is it because of the stupid snowsuit?” I slowly shook my head. “I just suddenly realized that you already have someone you genuinely want to spend your life with. Why should I force myself into the picture?” Hank’s face turned as black as thunder. Wendy suddenly let out a dramatic sob, her eyes turning bright red. “This is all my fault! Fine, I’ll leave!” She turned around and sprinted blindly into the freezing snowstorm. Hank instantly lunged forward to chase her. He took two steps, then violently whipped his head back to look at me. “Tracy,” his voice was hoarse and furious. “When we had absolutely nothing, Wendy was the only one who threw us a lifeline. “I coddle her, I spoil her, I agree with her because it is basic human networking! Why can’t you ever understand that?!” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and bolted after her into the blizzard. Once again, I was left standing entirely alone on the street. A snowflake landed on my lip. It was strange. Why did it taste like salt? I walked into a sports store, bought the exact snowsuit I wanted, and hailed a cab home. When I stepped out of the car, I checked my phone. Zero missed calls. The only notification was a text from the snowboard shop employee, confirming that my board had been delivered to my front door. But when I reached my porch, the board was gone. I was about to call building security when I accidentally opened my Instagram feed. Wendy had just posted a new photo: “There’s no sadness a little snow can’t fix!” The photo was of the exact snowboard I had spent weeks researching and selecting. The background was my own living room. A sickening mix of confusion and anger washed over me. My hands shook as I unlocked the front door. The entryway lights were blazing. Wendy was sitting on my couch, caressing the snowboard as if it were a priceless artifact. Hank was standing next to her, looking down at his phone, typing notes. The second he saw me, his expression dissolved into pure panic. He practically teleported across the room. Before I could even speak, he clamped a heavy hand over my mouth and physically shoved me back out the front door into the freezing hallway. I violently ripped his hand off my face. “Hank, you better give me a damn good explanation for why she has my snowboard.” Hank dug his fingers into my shoulders, his eyes darting frantically toward the door, aggressively shushing me. “Keep your voice down! Don’t let Wendy hear you! “She has been spoiled her whole life. She can’t handle being criticized. She was crying so hard, so I just… told her you bought the board specifically for her as an apology.” My eyes widened in absolute disbelief. “Me? Apologize to her?” Suddenly, the front door swung open. Wendy launched herself at me, throwing her arms around my neck. “Tracy, I forgive you! We’re still besties!” Out of the corner of my eye, Hank was frantically signaling me to play along. I slowly, deliberately peeled her arms off my shoulders. Then, I pulled out my phone, typed “911” into the keypad, and held the glowing screen right in front of their faces. I spoke slowly, emphasizing every syllable. “Taking things without permission is called theft.” Wendy froze instantly. All the blood drained from Hank’s face. He grabbed my wrist with a vice-like grip and dragged me into the master bedroom, slamming the door shut behind us. His eyes were completely bloodshot. “Do you really have to humiliate her like this? “It’s just a piece of plastic! Are you insane?” I stared at him for a long time. Suddenly, all the tension left my muscles. I just felt entirely, overwhelmingly exhausted. “You’re right. It’s not worth it.” “Let’s break up, Hank.” A raw, guttural roar ripped out of Hank’s throat. “No!” I flinched, startled by the sheer violence in his voice. He realized he had lost control and immediately lowered his tone into a harsh, desperate whisper. “If you dump me right now, do you have any idea how embarrassed Wendy will be? “Tracy, you are an adult! Can you stop throwing irrational tantrums like a child?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I’m throwing a tantrum?” Hank took a step closer, towering over me. “Are you telling me I’m the villain here? “I am breaking my back trying to keep your best friend happy! I spend more time managing her emotions than I do yours! And I’m doing all of it for the company! I’m doing it so I can give you a better life!” The room fell dead silent. I heard my own voice whisper, hollow and broken. “But I never asked you to sacrifice yourself like that for me.” Tears flooded my vision. I dropped to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest, wrapping my arms around myself. Hank let out a long, heavy sigh. He gently slipped my phone out of my hand and typed a quick apology message to Wendy on my behalf. After he finished, his voice became soft and gentle again. “Tracy, just take some time to really think about this. “It’s getting late. I’m going to drive Wendy home.” Just as his hand touched the doorknob, I called out to him. “Hank. Are you really doing all of this to give me a better life? Or did you just construct an elaborate excuse so you could justify spending all your time with her without feeling guilty?” The air in the room stood still for a terrifying second. Then, Hank let out a light, completely unabashed laugh. “Does it really matter? You’re the one I’m marrying in the end. Isn’t that enough?” He looked down at the floor, sighing softly. “It’s just… the more time I spend with Wendy, the more I realize how heavy my life is with you. When I look at you, I just get reminded of those miserable, poverty-stricken years. “Carrying the weight of this company and our future is exhausting, Tracy. You have to let me find my own happiness somewhere.” With that, he opened the door and walked out. I sat slumped on the hardwood floor, staring blindly at the wall. A few hours later, my phone vibrated. It was a text from Hank. “Wendy is having a panic attack and can’t sleep. I’m going to stay at her place tonight. Don’t wait up.” I stared at the glowing text message for a very long time. The final, microscopic ember of hope in my chest permanently died. With frozen fingers, I opened a travel app and bought a one-way ticket to a ski resort out West. My flight left at dawn. Hank, I am never waiting for you again. Early the next morning, someone started violently pounding on my front door. When I opened it, Hank was standing there, his face completely twisted with rage. Wendy was standing right behind him, her eyes swollen, her shoulders shaking with quiet sobs. “Tracy, what the hell is wrong with you?” I looked up, completely lost. Hank aggressively shoved his phone screen directly into my face. That’s when I saw it. Our company’s internal forum was completely blowing up. An anonymous account was mass-posting vicious rumors, accusing Hank and Wendy of having an illicit, sleazy affair. His voice dropped into a lethal whisper. “Tracy, if you want to break up, fine. But why do you have to be so incredibly vindictive? Why are you trying to destroy our reputations?” My entire body flinched. I froze in the doorway. “I… I didn’t do that.” Wendy choked on a sob and stepped forward, playing the ultimate victim. “Tracy, I know you’ve always been jealous that I was the one who saved the company, but you can’t fake a real emotional connection! “How could you use such a disgusting, dirty trick against me… If this leaks to the industry, my life is ruined!” She looked like she was about to collapse from the sheer injustice of it all. Hank stared at me like I was a complete monster. “Tracy, you are going to go online and post a public retraction right now!” My throat tightened painfully. My fingernails dug so deep into my palms I almost drew blood. “What exactly do you want me to do?” Hank was momentarily stunned by how eerily calm I sounded. But Wendy’s eyes immediately lit up. She quickly unzipped her designer purse and pulled out two crisp sheets of paper. The first was a formal letter of apology and a full confession to the rumors. The second was a termination notice. She looked at me with those big, tear-filled eyes. “Tracy, we have to kill this rumor before it spreads. I drafted an apology letter on my way over. All you have to do is sign it.” My voice felt like sandpaper. “And the termination notice?” Wendy instantly stopped crying and glanced nervously at Hank. He lowered his voice, trying to sound reasonable. “That was my decision. Just to avoid any more internal drama, I need you to stay away from the office for a while. “Once this whole mess blows over, I’ll officially rehire you.” I looked down at the paper. The official company seal—my company’s seal—was stamped in red ink at the bottom. I let out a dry, hollow laugh and signed my name on both pages. Hank let out a massive sigh of relief, as if a huge burden had just been lifted off his shoulders. He took the papers, grabbed Wendy’s arm, and the two of them hurried back toward the office to do damage control. I leaned against the doorframe, taking one final, lingering look at the apartment we had shared for years. Then, I grabbed my snowboard, walked out, and never looked back.

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