Before the wedding could begin, the groom, Clive Sanchez, was hauled away for questioning. He'd raped his widowed sister-in-law.

I gathered up my wedding gown and rushed after him, desperate to explain, but he stopped me.

"I turned myself in."

"Jade's pregnant. Mom and Dad still hate her for running off with my brother, and they won't accept the child. Her family went to the police to force the Sanchezs' hand."

"I have to marry her. It's the only way to protect my brother's child, and to keep people from talking about them."

He took out the wedding ring and slid it onto my finger.

"You'll have to bear with being my mistress for a little while. Wait nineteen years for me. Once the child is grown, I'll come back to you."

He couldn't stand to see them whispered about, yet he could stand to see me branded the other woman.

Nineteen years. He said it as lightly as nineteen minutes.

"The wedding physical came back. You're pregnant. It's bad timing, so I've arranged the abortion. You'll go right after the ceremony."

The ache in my chest went cold all at once.

In that moment, I came fully awake.

The police car pulled away and disappeared. I worked the ring off my finger, dropped it on the ground, and ground my heel into it.

You thought you could bind me with this. Clive Sanchez, you think far too much of yourself.

…

I made two calls.

The first to my assistant: halt every deal with the Sanchezs. Without my backing, the company would seize up in no time, and Clive would lose everything.

The second to the housekeeper, going down the list of everything in the house that held a memory.

The wall art Clive and I had painted together. The matching pajamas we'd picked out. The couple dolls we'd made in each other's likeness…

At my word, all of it went into the fire.

Watching the flames churn on the screen, I went on. "Pack up Clive's and Jade Jennings's things. Send them back to the Sanchez estate."

I paused, then added, "Leave the throw."

Two months ago, Jade had come back with news of Clive's older brother's death. The Sanchezs wouldn't take her in, her own parents wanted nothing to do with her, and when she had nowhere left to go, I was the one who took her in and let her stay in the wedding home that was in my name.

If Clive meant to marry her, I'd see to it the family welcomed them properly.

"Yesterday, Miss Jennings had morning sickness…" The housekeeper faltered. "Mr. Sanchez used the throw to clean her up, and then he threw it out…"

A sharp pain drove straight through my chest, and my breath caught.

That blanket. I'd stayed up a whole month of nights knitting it by hand.

Clive's skin took offense to so much. Leave him too long against the wrong fabric and it would turn red and itch, until even his chest went tight on him. And of course he loved to curl up on the couch to work. So I'd knitted him a throw, stitch by stitch, soft enough that it would never touch him wrong.

It was the first thing I'd ever learned to knit. Every mistake, I unraveled and started over. Dozens of times. By the time it was finally done, something in my wrist had given out for good, and it still catches me without warning, a pain that bites all the way to the bone.

Clive used to massage my wrist, pained for me, and he'd wash that throw by hand himself, like it mattered.

And now he'd used it to wipe up Jade's vomit and thrown it away like trash. Not a shred of regret.

I laughed at myself and pushed past the swarm of needling pain in my chest. "Never mind."

"There's a pendant under my pillow. Set it aside somewhere safe for me. I'm coming back for it now."

But the housekeeper went quiet for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was tighter still. "Last night, while you stayed at the old estate, I saw Mr. Sanchez take that pendant into Miss Jennings's room. She wore it out today…"

My mind went white. I hung up and called Clive instead.

Once. Twice. Three times…

On the ninety-ninth ring, he finally picked up.

His voice was low, gentle, and unable to hide how little he cared. "I'm filing the marriage paperwork with Jade. Be good, hm? The sooner I wrap things up here, the sooner I'll have time for you."

My fingertips had gone numb with panic. "You took my pendant?"

"That's what this is about?" His patience snapped, then strained back into softness. "Didn't you say the thing was supposed to calm the nerves? Jade can't sleep, so I gave it to her. Your pendant finally getting some use. So you didn't pray for it for nothing, right?"

That easy, entitled tone. As if taking what was mine and handing it to his new wife were the most natural thing in the world. As if I ought to feel honored.

"Don't go bothering Jade over it. I'll buy you ten to make up for it…"

"Who would want them!" I finally broke, the words tearing out of me. "That was my mother's. She prayed for it for me when she was already dying!"

"You took something of mine and gave it to Jade Jennings without my permission. Clive Sanchez, that's stealing!"

"Why do you have to be so cruel about it?" Clive paused. "You only want the pendant because you're going through with the abortion, don't you?"

There was a sneer buried in his voice. "It's a minor procedure. Do you really need it for that?"

When Jade so much as slept badly, he treated it like a crisis and stole the one thing that mattered most to me.

But the procedure that would kill our child wasn't even worth a second thought to him.

The cold swept through me. I closed my eyes, hung up without another word, and drove straight for the county clerk's office.

On the way, Clive called.

I didn't pick up. A text came through instead.

【That was me failing to understand how nervous you are before the procedure. I'm sorry. You'll get the pendant back. Just answer the phone first, Millie.】

The phone buzzed again. I let it connect, and his voice came through at once.

"I ran into someone I know while I was at the office just now. Our wedding fell through today, and I'm worried people will start talking about Jade. I need you to step in and set the record straight."

"Just tell them Jade and I used to be together, that you schemed your way between us and that's why we broke up, and now you've come to your senses and want to admit publicly that you were the other woman. Apologize to Jade in front of everyone."

"You don't have to worry about people calling me a cheater over it. I can take a little heat—that's nothing to me. But I will not let Jade suffer for this."

"Do this right, and once the child is grown, I'll give you the pendant back."

I gripped the wheel, and suddenly I was laughing.

Laughing until the tears ran down.

He'd kept Jade wrapped up and untouchable, convinced that taking a few harmless insults made him some kind of martyr.

And I, the one actually wronged, the one only trying to take back what was mine, was supposed to be shoved out front to carry a crime I never committed and stand there while the whole world spat on me.

And he didn't care at all.

I said nothing. I just hung up.

When I reached the clerk's office, I caught Clive's car pulling away, and I went straight after it.

I followed it all the way to an upscale restaurant, where I watched with my own eyes as Clive climbed out of the driver's seat and opened the passenger door.

A foot reached out of the car, and he dropped to one knee, taking that slender ankle in his hand, carefully tying the loosened lace, brushing the dust from the toe of her shoe, and only then easing Jade gently out.

The sight went into me like a knife, and my eyes were wet before I could stop them.

In the Sanchez family's worst days, an investor had humiliated him on purpose, sticking out a foot as he stepped from his car and ordering him to shine his shoes.

"What I do to Millicent Maddox is none of your business, you're hired help. Understood?"

That became the deepest scar he carried. After that, he never bent for anyone again.

Once I'd only asked him to tuck a blanket over my mother's legs while she sat in her wheelchair, and he'd flown into a rage, with no thought for my embarrassment or how it made my mother feel.

Even that had made me ache for him. After that, every morning before we left the house, I knelt and shined his shoes, slipped them onto his feet myself.

I had guarded that wound so carefully. And now what I was watching slapped it all back in my face.

I got out of the car and walked toward them, one step at a time.

"Clive."

His head snapped around, his eyes darting away, his face caught between awkwardness and panic, and still he moved on instinct to shield Jade behind him.

"Millie, why are you here?"

The moment Jade saw me, her eyes went red. "It's all my fault! I'm the one who wronged you. Don't blame Clive, blame me—"

Her little performance was all it took to set him off.

The flinching dropped away. He shoved me, hard.

"That's enough, Millicent! I already apologized, what more do you want? Just because you can't have a child of your own, you'd force Jade to die with my Sanchez blood inside her?"

"I forced her?" I looked straight at Clive. "When her parents and your family had backed her into a corner, I was the one who took her in!"

"If you wanted to keep her and the baby, you could have sent her abroad. Instead you'd rather burn down our wedding than not marry her. Is the child even yours?"

The slap landed hard across my face.

Clive's expression went black. "You knew Mom and Dad didn't like Jade, and you took her in on purpose so they'd unload all their anger on her. As if that wasn't enough, now you want to ruin her name too!"

A low ripple of gasps went up around us. A few of them, I realized, were guests who'd been at the wedding earlier.

"Wait, the wedding got called off because of this woman?"

"Tsk. Catching a mistress in the act, huh."

Someone called out, loud and deliberate, "Mr. Sanchez, what exactly is this lady to you?"

I twisted my lips. "Yeah, Clive. What are we?"

Jade pushed forward through the pointing fingers. "Millicent, hit me, curse me, do whatever you want. Just please don't put Clive on the spot in front of everyone—"

I dodged the hand she reached toward me, and she suddenly clutched her stomach with a sharp hiss.

Clive caught her against him at once, and when he saw how pale she'd gone, something in his eyes turned to stone.

"Jade is my first love!"

He tucked her behind him and pulled a photo from his pocket. A picture of two people, a boy and a girl in school uniforms, standing side by side.

"I only found out recently. Back then it was Millicent Maddox who hired thugs to torment her, who forced her to break up with me. This vicious woman is the real mistress who tore us apart!"

My eyes went wide, and my voice shook at the sheer madness of it.

"Clive—you sure that's how that photo really goes?"

After Raymond died, Clive sank into a deep depression. Watching him like that, I hated that I couldn't take the pain off him and carry it myself.

He said he wanted every photo of Raymond, and I went to acquaintances one by one, begging, doing whatever it took to give him that.

The one in his hand was the one I'd dug out after nights without sleep, sifting through tens of thousands of pictures on his old phone.

It had been a photo of three people.

Now Raymond, who'd stood in the middle, had been cut away, leaving only Clive and Jade.

Looking at how carefully it had been doctored, a cold dread crawled over my whole body.

So he'd prepared all along to pour every filthy thing onto me.

A bleak chill spread through me. I took out my phone, pulled up the original, and barely lifted my hand before Clive's face flashed with panic and he knocked the phone flying.

"Millicent Maddox! What else are you trying to do to Jade?"

"Isn't this all about you wanting back the thing I gave her? Fine, take it!"

He lifted the heirloom pendant off Jade's neck and hurled it against the ground.

"Take your thing and get out! Don't ever come bother us again!"

I lunged on instinct, but I was too slow.

The jade hit the floor a beat ahead of me, and a flying shard sliced a long cut across my face.

Blood welled up, but I felt nothing, my eyes red and fixed on Clive.

He took a step back without meaning to, panic crossing his face.

He had never once imagined that my eyes could look at him with hate.

"Millicent... I..."

Before he finished, Jade cried out in pain. "My stomach! Clive, the baby—"

Clive snapped back to her and swept her up into his arms.

"Don't be scared. I'm taking you to the hospital right now!"

The leather shoes I'd once polished spotless ground down over the back of my hand, and his stride never wavered.

The pain blacked out my vision, but I kept my eyes open and watched his back as he walked away.

The image in my mind slowly overlaid it.

The Clive in my memory, the night that rich heir drugged me and dragged me off when I couldn't fight back, had thrown himself in without a second thought and knocked the man down with one punch.

That night, he'd held me just like this, and walked away just as fast, never once looking back.