He'd barely pulled the strap down before Warren shrugged off his jacket and draped it over Yvonne's shoulders, pulling her into a tight embrace. "Don't move. Stop crying. If you cry any more, you won't look pretty for your graduation photos."

Then he turned and shot me a warning look. "Leonora, that's enough. Today is Yvonne's graduation. I brought her here. The necklace was my graduation gift to her."

My chest seized like something had lodged itself behind my ribs. I couldn't breathe. I clenched my jaw and stared at him. "You and Yvonne. You don't think you owe me an explanation?"

"She's your lover? Then what am I?"

He barely glanced at me, his tone dismissive. "Leonora, Yvonne is just a twenty-year-old girl. Do you really have to be this petty?"

"It's nothing more than a young girl's innocent admiration. I indulged one small wish of hers. What's the big deal? You're making a scene."

With that, he wrapped his arm around Yvonne and walked out of the venue, leaving me standing alone in the crowd like the punchline of a joke.

Yvonne. She was the girl I'd first noticed outside the office, handing out flyers. It had been nearly a hundred degrees that summer day, and she wouldn't even spend a dollar on a bottle of water because she was saving every cent for next semester's tuition and living expenses.

She'd just moved to the city for college. She had no one. Everything fell on her own shoulders.

I admired her independence, her resilience.

When I found out she was studying the same field as me, I wanted to help her.

I added her on WhatsApp and offered to cover four years of tuition and living expenses so she could focus on her studies.

To repay me, she came to the office every weekend and every school break to help with odd jobs.

That was how she met Warren, who drove me to and from work every day.

Whenever I was too busy, I'd ask Warren to drop Yvonne off at campus. He used to complain that she was cutting into our time together, and I always laughed and told him he was being ridiculous, getting jealous over nothing.

But gradually, the complaints stopped. He even started reminding me on his own that he hadn't seen Yvonne in a while, asking whether school was keeping her too busy, suggesting we send her some supplies.

A colleague once warned me to be careful about letting my husband spend too much time alone with Yvonne. A lot of college girls, she said, went crazy for men like Warren: mature, established, successful.

I always told them they were overthinking it. But they weren't the ones overthinking it. Everyone had seen it. The dynamic between Warren and Yvonne had shifted long ago. The whole world knew. I was the only one who didn't.

When I got home, Warren was already sitting on the couch, waiting.

He was scrolling through his phone, brow furrowed, swiping faster and faster. The moment he saw me walk through the door, he tossed the phone onto the coffee table. His voice carried the weight of a command. "Leonora, using tactics like these against a naive young girl. Don't you think that's going too far?"

"In just a few hours, rumors calling her a homewrecker, saying she's someone's kept woman, all of it trending online."

"You moved fast, I'll give you that. How much did you spend? How many bots did you hire?"

"How can you do this to her and not feel a shred of guilt? Do you have any idea what cyber-harassment does to a woman?"

I stood frozen in the doorway, my voice hollow. "What are you talking about?"

He hurled his phone at me. It struck my brow bone dead-on. A sharp, splitting pain exploded across my forehead, and I crouched down, pressing both hands to the spot.

"Playing innocent? Leonora, I thought you knew your place. Using your cutthroat business tactics on a girl with no one in her corner. You really think you can bully her just because she has nobody to protect her?"

I felt something warm seeping from the gash, running down and blurring the vision in one eye. I didn't bother wiping it away. All I could manage was to open my mouth in my own defense. "I didn't do anything."

Warren rose to his feet. "I'm giving you one night. If you don't go online tonight, clear her name, and make those trending topics disappear, tomorrow I'll handle it myself."

"Leonora, God sees everything you do. Yvonne has it hard enough already. She has nothing. All she wants is a little bit of love. Can't you even let her have that?"

"I gave you the title of Mrs. Henson. You've lived in luxury. You have no idea how difficult her life has been."

I bit back the searing pain and let out a bitter laugh. Tears blurred my vision as I stared at the man across from me, the man I'd been married to for nearly ten years.

The man who once looked at me like I was the only person in the world now regarded me with nothing but disgust and impatience.

"All she wants is a little bit of love?" I echoed. "Another woman's husband's love?"

"Warren, the internet got it right. She is the other woman. She is your kept mistress."

Warren erupted. He lunged forward, shoved me against the wall. My lower back slammed into the edge of the cabinet, and his hand closed around my throat. "So you admit it, Leonora. You're the one behind all of this."

"Yvonne is not the other woman. Whoever I love is my rightful partner."

"Isn't there a saying online? 'The one who isn't loved is the real third wheel.'"

Blood from the gash on my brow trickled down onto his hand. He released me, flicking the blood off his fingers with a look of revulsion. His voice went cold. "You have one night. I don't care how you do it. Tell them you made it all up. Tell them you were jealous. I don't care. By tomorrow morning, I don't want Yvonne seeing a single one of those stories."

He grabbed his phone and left. His voice drifted back from the elevator lobby, soft and tender in a way I hadn't heard in years. "Yvonne, don't cry. I'm on my way. I told you I'd take care of it. Don't worry."

I crumpled to the floor. The room tilted and spun. My brow was split open, the pain blinding, and a deeper, more terrifying ache was spreading through my abdomen. My heart stuttered. I pressed my hand to my stomach, dialed 911, and blacked out.

When I came to, I was lying in a hospital bed. Bridget Calloway was beside me, her eyes swollen and red from crying. "Thank God you hit my emergency contact before you passed out. Otherwise the paramedics couldn't have even gotten through your front door."

I tried to sit up. Pain lanced through my brow and my stomach at the same time.

I reached down to touch my belly, but Bridget caught my hand and held it still. "Don't. Your brow bone was cracked open. They could see bone. It took several stitches."

She paused.

"And the baby. They couldn't save it."

I froze. My hand hovered over my stomach. "What did you say? What baby?"

Bridget stared at me. "You didn't know you were two months pregnant? By the time the ambulance arrived, the impact to your back had caused severe bleeding. The baby didn't make it."

A sharp pain tore through my chest. Warren and I had been married for years. I'd wanted a child so badly, tried for so long, and it had never happened. And now one had come to me quietly, without my knowing, and left just as quietly. Sent away by its own father's hands.

Tears slid down my face. "A baby. God, I should be ashamed of myself. I didn't even know I'd been a mother."

Bridget steadied me. "Do you want to call Warren?"

"I already tried last night from your phone. He never picked up."

She handed me my phone. The screen was flooded with unread messages. My stomach dropped. I tapped one open, scanned it quickly, then pulled up a browser.

The internet had exploded. Someone had leaked allegations that the gold-medal winner of this year's Starlight Cup jewelry design competition, Leonora Pruitt, had plagiarized another designer's work.

The post laid out detailed evidence: original drafts, a complete timeline, everything presented with surgical precision.

It went further. It claimed that during the judging period, I had been seen dining with one of the judges and escorting him back to his hotel late at night. The implication was unmistakable: that I had traded my body for the top prize.

Attached were photos of me helping the elderly judge back to his hotel after he'd fallen ill. I'd been supporting his arm. But the angle of the shots was deliberately chosen to make it look intimate.

The comments section was a wall of venom: "Get this trash out of our industry."

"Ordinary people like us, with no connections, never stand a chance."

"Look at this—they found the original creator. It's a college girl. She even posted all her original drafts, from start to finish. God, that's awful. Her work was straight-up stolen."

"She's still in college! She was counting on the prize money for tuition, and now someone's ripped off her designs. She's got nothing left."

"Leonora Pruitt is a stain on the design industry. Get her out."

"The original artist is named Yvonne Drake. Isn't that the girl from the trending topics yesterday? Poor thing—she was the real victim, and she got cyber-harassed on top of it."

"Leonora is an absolute monster."

The post had been up for half a day, and the firestorm online had already reached a fever pitch.

Bridget's face went pale. "What the hell is going on? Why are your photos up there too? Who did this? This is slander."

"There's no way you plagiarized anyone's work. What are these people even talking about? Someone's targeting you—this has to be a setup."

I saw that the studio had stepped in to respond, with my colleagues confirming they'd watched me design the jewelry with their own eyes. But the moment they spoke up, users mass-reported the post, and the flood of abuse forced them to shut down the comments.

The blood drained from my face. Who else could it be? The only person with access to my computer and my study, the only one who could have taken my original drafts, was Warren.

He'd stolen my design sketches and passed Yvonne off as the original creator.

I never imagined he would go this far for her.

I called Warren. He picked up almost immediately. "Having regrets? Leonora, I told you—I gave you one night. But you did nothing."

My voice caught in my throat. I couldn't get a single word out.

How had it come to this between us? The man who once couldn't bear to see me cry, who'd sworn he never wanted to see my tears again—that same man was now destroying my reputation for another woman, trying to bury me alive.

"Warren, do you really hate me that much?"