Chapter 1

My foster mother, Martha, was dying.

The doctors at the local Memphis clinic used words like "end-stage liver failure" and "critical." All I heard was the ticking of a clock. The transplant she needed cost over $500,000, a number so big it felt like a joke. The bank certainly thought so. They laughed me out of the office.

I was pulling a double shift at the diner, the grease clinging to my skin, when my phone buzzed. It was Nicole. Dr. Nicole Anderson now. My Nicole.

We grew up in the same foster home, two kids clinging to each other in a world that didn't want us. I loved her then, and I love her now. I thought she loved me too, before she got into medical school and left our world behind.

"Ethan, I heard about Martha," her voice was smooth, professional, but with a hint of the girl I knew. "Meet me. Now."

She was waiting for me outside the hospital, looking perfect in her crisp blue scrubs. She didn't waste time. She held out a cashier's check. My eyes widened when I saw the amount. It was all there.

"Nicole, I... I don't know what to say."

"Marry me, Ethan," she said, her voice steady. "Marry me right now, and this is yours. Martha gets her surgery."

In my past life, I cried. I grabbed the check and her hands, babbling about how I knew she still loved me, how this was a miracle.

And it was a deal with the devil. Martha died on the operating table. "Complications," they said. A week later, drunk and broken, I stumbled into a private hospital wing looking for Nicole. I found her. She was with him. Caleb Johns, the slick, rising-star politician.

She was in his arms. "It's done," she whispered to him. "The liver was a perfect match for you. Marrying a deadbeat like Ethan was a small price to pay to keep you alive."

The sound of my own heart breaking was louder than the car crash that killed me moments later.

But now, I was back. Standing in the same spot, under the same buzzing fluorescent light, with the same check in front of me.

I looked at the check, then back at her face. The face I had loved my whole life.

I calmly pushed the check back into her hand.

"A marriage should be about love, Nicole," I said, my voice quiet but firm. "We don't have that."