It took exactly three years for my marriage to free-fall from a modern-day fairytale into a living hell. Harrison Winthrop was Boston real estate royalty—the heir apparent who had never been told “no” a day in his life. I was Rowan Hayes, an orphan with nothing to my name but a degree and a mountain of student debt. Society pages and whispered gossip agreed: our love story was a delusion. But Harrison shielded me from the vicious rumors. He went to war with his own family, surrendered his inheritance, and gave me a wedding that brought the entire city to a standstill. Three years later, Serena Montgomery—the golden girl he grew up with, the one who got away—got divorced and moved back from Paris. I was four months pregnant at the time. The very next day, I was served with divorce papers. The terms were brutally simple: the settlement was contingent on me terminating the pregnancy. The sheer shock and devastation sent my body into a traumatic tailspin. I went into premature labor, hemorrhaged heavily, and nearly died on the operating table. As my emergency contact, Harrison’s phone rang and rang. It wasn’t until the fourteenth attempt that someone finally picked up. It was his executive assistant. “Mr. Winthrop is currently hosting Ms. Montgomery’s birthday dinner. Please direct your calls elsewhere.” 1 Three years later, my phone lit up with an unsaved number. It was my long-lost ex-husband. His tone was deeply familiar, colored with the distinct, boyish pout I hadn’t heard in years. “Ro, I’ve been hurt for so long. Why haven’t you come to see me?” I hung up immediately. The phone rang again, relentless and shrill, until I finally blocked the number. By 8:40 PM, a panicked hospital resident called, practically begging me in tears to come down to the ward, saying his job was on the line. Out of pity for a fellow working professional, I went. Harrison was propped up in a hospital bed, his right leg immobilized in a heavy brace. A thick ring of gauze wrapped around his forehead, a faint bloom of crimson seeping through the white fabric. He was aimlessly scrolling on his phone when he suddenly stopped, lifting his head. His eyes lit up instantly. “Rowan. I knew you’d come.” He flashed a cocky, triumphant grin, boasting about his incredible hearing just like he used to. “I’d know your footsteps anywhere.” I stood in the doorway, offering no smile, no greeting. I just looked at him in total silence. Harrison Winthrop had amnesia. His assistant had briefed me in the hallway: during a site inspection for a new high-rise, a piece of scaffolding had collapsed on him. The neurologists had no timeline for his recovery. 2 His memory had hard-stopped at seven years ago. He was trapped in the era of the fierce, defiant boy who loved me. Back then, the trust-fund brats in his circle used to call me a social-climbing gold digger, placing bets on when I’d milk him dry and dump him. When Harrison found out, he flew into a blind rage and brawled with his own friends in the middle of a country club. He came back to my dorm that night, holding my hand, crying out of sheer frustration, promising me he would cut ties with all of them for disrespecting me. Shortly after, he moved out of the Winthrop estate and rented a cramped apartment with me off-campus. On our first night there, he held me so tightly I could barely breathe. He buried his face in the crook of my neck, refusing to let go, trembling like a puppy separated from its mother. In the dead of night, I heard him whisper into the dark, “Ro, you’re all I have left now.” On the eve of our wedding, he couldn’t stop talking. He held both my hands, his voice vibrating with a frantic, euphoric joy, his eyes shining with unshed tears. “Rowan, we have a family now. We have a home.” “I swear to God, Rowan, I will treat you like a queen. I will love you until the day I die.” But as the years bled on, Harrison forgot those promises. He stopped loving Rowan Hayes. He gathered up all his fierce, world-burning devotion and handed it to another woman. His home no longer had room for me. All he left me was a brush with death on a sterile operating table and a stack of legal documents severing my life from his. 3 But the Harrison sitting in the hospital bed remembered none of that. He didn’t understand why the girl who used to melt into his embrace was now standing ten feet away, staring at him like he was a stranger. “Ro?” He called out softly, his fingers anxiously twisting the edge of his bedsheet. “Did Pierce and those assholes say something to you again? Tell me. I’ll go beat the shit out of them right now.” When I didn’t answer, he tugged at my sleeve, trying to coax a smile out of me the way he used to. I lowered my gaze, letting it rest on the jagged, faded scar across his knuckles. He had gotten that scar fighting for my honor. What was once a pair of perfectly manicured, aristocratic hands had been permanently marred for my sake. Now, there were fresh cuts on his face and arms, yet none of it diminished his striking, arrogant beauty. He was still the dazzling, untouchable Harrison Winthrop. Time had seemingly spared him. —Except for the faint, almost imperceptible lines at the corners of his eyes. A quiet, cruel reminder that he was no longer the twenty-year-old boy who would burn down the world for me. I pulled my gaze away, took out my phone, opened the calendar app, and held it up to his face. My voice was utterly flat. “It is 202X. We have been divorced for three years.” Reality slammed into him. His expression froze, the light draining from his eyes. But a second later, he let out a breathless laugh, as if I had just delivered a punchline. “So we did get married.” He smiled—that arrogant, magnetic, irrepressible smile. “I knew it. I always knew I was going to marry you. Who else could it be? I’m so obsessed with you, it had to be my Rowan.” He was still wearing that boyish armor. Bold, unwavering, with a touch of stubborn childishness. But this time, there was no one left to play along with his banter. I let out a slow exhale, pulled up a vinyl chair, sat down, and began casually inspecting my fresh manicure. The glossy polish caught the harsh fluorescent light. Across from me, the room went dead silent. I finally looked up. His eyes were rimmed with red. The lazy, confident drawl was gone. “Rowan. If you want to take a knife and drive it straight into my chest, just do it. Don’t torture me with a sick joke like this.” His stare turned defiant, desperate. “What did I do wrong? Or… did you find someone else?” Even as he tried to flip the blame onto me, I didn’t feel a flicker of anger. I just looked at him, my eyes as still as a frozen lake. “Harrison,” I said softly. “You forgot.” “You were the one who handed me the knife. And you were the one who filed for the divorce.” “That’s impossible.” He shot back instinctively, the denial sharp and absolute. “I would never leave you. Not in this lifetime. I’d have to be dead first.” A short, hollow sound escaped my lips. “Hah.” At twenty, that exact sentence had brought me to my knees in tears of gratitude. At twenty-five, the memory of that sentence had nearly destroyed me. Now, pushing thirty, it was just a bad joke. He had said it a thousand times, and I had believed it with every fiber of my being. And then, he betrayed me. He grew disgusted by me. He discarded me. I remembered the day I called him. I remembered the careless, mocking lilt in his voice through the receiver. “I did love you once. But that was a long time ago. We’ve been together too long. It got stale. Isn’t it normal to lose the spark?” “And get rid of the kid. Stop standing outside the Winthrop lobby waiting for me. It’s pathetic.” I had been so desperate to save our marriage. He hadn’t come home in weeks, and I had no idea where else to find him. So, I had stood on the pavement outside his gleaming corporate tower, four months pregnant, waiting. I knew it was an ugly scene. I knew how it looked to the executives in their bespoke suits. But when the word pathetic slipped so easily from the mouth of the man I loved, my heart actually stopped beating for a second. 4 In the hospital room, his knuckles turned white as he gripped my coat, his hands trembling violently. His voice cracked into a plea. “Ro, you have to believe me. Look at me. How could I ever say something like that to you?” I smoothly pulled my coat from his grasp, looking down to adjust the chain strap on my leather purse. My voice didn’t waver. “Believe you?” “Harrison, you have a thousand different resources at your disposal to verify your own history. Don’t sit here grabbing at my clothes, telling me it’s impossible.” I turned on my heel and walked toward the door. Behind me came the violent clatter of crutches hitting the linoleum. Then, the heavy, agonizing thud of him dragging his shattered leg, stumbling frantically after me. “Rowan! Rowan, stop!” “Rowan Hayes, you are not walking out that door!” A heavy crash shook the floorboards, followed immediately by a nurse’s terrified scream and the chaotic squeak of rubber soles rushing down the hall. “Mr. Winthrop! You can’t put weight on—!” Dr. Aaron Miller rounded the corner, slowing his pace when he saw me standing by the elevator. He hesitated. “Are you… sure you don’t want to stay a little longer?” I shook my head. Aaron nodded slowly. “Right. Make sense.” “I mean, you guys have been over for a while. Listen, thanks for coming down anyway. I gotta go deal with this.” He pointed a thumb back toward the chaotic shouting in the ward and hurried off. I stood in the corridor for a moment, listening to the muffled commotion, and then I pressed the down button and left. I didn’t go back to see him. The incident didn’t so much as ripple the surface of my life. Aaron Miller called me a few times over the next couple of weeks. I didn’t answer, but I didn’t decline the calls either. I just let the phone vibrate on my desk until the screen went black. Harrison Winthrop and I were always meant to be parallel lines. When I was young, I crashed into his orbit with reckless abandon, foolishly believing it would earn me a lifetime of being cherished. In the end, I was nothing but collateral damage. The price of entry into his world had been so agonizing that, even now, I still woke up suffocating in the middle of the night from the nightmares. 5 A few weeks later, a crisis at the firm kept me late. It was nearly 10:00 PM by the time I stepped off the elevator on my floor. Leaning against the wall next to my apartment door was a woman with a perfect salon blowout. She arched a manicured brow at me, her expression radiating innocent concern. She offered a sickeningly sweet smile. “Rowan. It’s been a while.” My face remained blank. “Can I help you?” “Oh, it’s nothing major. I just really need you to stop clinging to Harrison.” Serena Montgomery blinked playfully, taking a step closer, the scent of her expensive Parisian perfume invading the hallway. “After all, the divorce is finalized, and he has a girlfriend now. It’s not a great look for you to throw yourself at him and play the other woman, is it?” I actually laughed out loud. I was too exhausted to even bother being insulted. “What’s wrong, Serena? You don’t trust the epic romance you’re so confident about?” Her sugary smile vanished instantly, replaced by a venomous sneer. “I’m just here to give you a reality check. Don’t flatter yourself. The person he is most disgusted by on this planet is you.” “Right. Got it.” My tone was deadpan. I brushed past her, unlocked my door, and slammed it shut without looking back. The very next day, I ran into Harrison. He had apparently broken out of the hospital. He was standing on the sidewalk outside my building, leaning heavily on a single crutch. He was wearing scrub pants and an oversized, mismatched wool coat. I kept my hands buried in my pockets, genuinely bewildered as to why the universe had suddenly decided to make me a magnet for Winthrop drama this week. At the sound of my footsteps, his head snapped up. Relief flooded his face, a brilliant smile breaking through his exhaustion—until his gaze drifted downward, and the smile shattered. I followed his line of sight down to the little hand wrapped tightly inside mine. Sophie’s hand. A second later, he was lurching forward, dragging his bad leg in a grotesque, desperate limp. Before he even reached us, his leg gave out. He collapsed hard onto the concrete, the crutch clattering violently against the pavement. Sophie jumped, terrified, and hid behind my legs. I turned slightly and gently stroked her hair. “It’s okay, Sophie, don’t be scared. This man is just… an old friend of Mommy’s. Why don’t you run upstairs and start your homework, okay?” She peeked timidly at Harrison, then looked up at me, gave a small nod, and scurried into the building. I stayed exactly where I was. Harrison Winthrop was kneeling on the cold sidewalk. He didn’t look like a thirty-something corporate titan; he looked like a lost toddler who had just watched his balloon float away into the sky. After a long pause, I walked over. I extended my hand, hesitated mid-air, but ultimately grabbed his arm to help him up. He stared up at me, his eyes wet and remarkably fragile. I hauled him to his feet, instantly let go, and took a half-step back. “You’re blocking the walkway.” His Adam’s apple bobbed. He let out a low, breathy chuckle. “When did you get so strong?” “None of your business.” He didn’t argue, but his eyes were locked onto my face, his voice tight and strained. “That little girl… is she your daughter?” “None of your business.” We moved into the narrow foyer of the building. His towering frame leaned heavily against the drywall, his expression bleeding with an unbearable sense of grievance. “You used to tell me we’d never keep secrets from each other.” 6 I smiled faintly. “You said it yourself. Used to.” His voice hitched. “Rowan, I—” I cut him off, having absolutely no desire to hear the rest of whatever he was about to say. “Save it. Why are you here? Did Serena send you to interrogate me?” At the mention of her name, his brow furrowed in sheer disgust. “Who cares about her? I saw her exactly once when I woke up. She wouldn’t stop whining. It was annoying as hell.” As soon as the words left his mouth, his gaze softened again, morphing into a tentative, agonizingly careful plea. He shuffled an inch closer, lowering his voice until it was almost a whisper. “I… I just wanted to come talk to you. Please?” Once I let him into the apartment, the crease between his brows never smoothed out. I poured him a glass of water and set it on the coffee table. The living room suffocated in silence for a long time. Suddenly, he looked up at me. His voice was hoarse, sounding like a man questioning his own sanity. “I don’t get it, Ro… All I ever wanted was to be with you. To protect you. To marry you and spend the rest of my life making you happy. But somehow, it all went completely wrong…” I looked into those confused, devastated eyes, and my voice came out eerily detached. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Harrison. It’s just biology.” “People stay together too long, and they get bored. They get annoyed. Eventually, they get disgusted. People change. Reality isn’t the immutable, frozen fantasy you cooked up in your head when you were twenty.” He had loved me. He had desperately wanted to marry me. He couldn’t bear the thought of me suffering even a papercut. But the promises made in the throes of love are only valid as long as the love remains. My words seemed to physically strike him. His eyelashes fluttered rapidly, his lips parting in mute horror. “But I remember…” he mumbled, shaking his head. “I remember we were in college. I loved you so much. I wanted to kill anyone who looked at you wrong. And you loved me. You used to blow on my bruised knuckles after a fight. When I got hurt, you would cry…” He started speaking faster, the words tumbling out in a broken, incoherent rush as tears spilled over his lashes. The sound of a man’s psyche fracturing filled my small living room. “Rowan, I didn’t do anything. I just went to sleep! And when I woke up, I was suddenly this… this evil bastard who betrayed you and destroyed your life… Do you have any idea how insane this is?” I let out a bone-deep sigh, letting the silence swallow his broken sobbing. He forgot. He refused to accept reality, or rather, he was terrified to face the monster he had become over the last seven years. But what did he expect me to do? In the years he had conveniently wiped from his brain, there was no domestic bliss. There was only a barren wasteland of cruelty. “Stop crying,” I said, pulling a tissue from the box and handing it to him. I walked into my bedroom to call Aaron Miller. When I came back out, Harrison was fast asleep on my cheap sofa, his breathing heavy. Noticing the bruised, purple exhaustion beneath his eyes, I instinctively softened my footsteps.
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