Chapter 1

Five years.

Sometimes it felt like a lifetime, other times, just a blink.

But the memory of that day was always there, fresh and sharp, a wound that never closed.

I remembered the white dress, the one he promised would be part of our dream wedding. Ryan Stone. My husband. My secret husband of three years.

I was eight months pregnant, my belly round and full under the silk. He had held my face in his hands the night before, his eyes full of promises.

"Tomorrow, Chloe," he had whispered, "the whole world will know you' re mine."

The whole world found out, all right. Just not in the way I dreamed.

I stood there, in front of our friends and family, my smile waiting for him. But he never came to the altar.

Instead, his assistant, Sarah Jenkins, walked down the aisle.

She wore a smug smile and a wedding ring that wasn't from a fantasy. It was real.

"I' m sorry to interrupt," she announced, her voice echoing in the shocked silence of the church. "But there seems to be a misunderstanding. Ryan and I were married yesterday."

The air left my lungs. The room started to spin.

Sarah' s eyes, cold and triumphant, locked onto mine.

"So I' m not sure who this woman is, pretending to be his bride. A mistress, perhaps?"

Her words hit me, one by one. She then turned to my parents, who were sitting in the front row, their faces pale with confusion and horror.

My parents. Mr. and Mrs. Miller. Respected marriage counselors, authors of books on love and commitment.

"And you," Sarah spat, pointing at them. "You' re the famous Millers, aren' t you? The experts on marriage. It' s a shame you couldn' t teach your own daughter not to be a slut. To not try and trap a man with an illegitimate child."

I looked for Ryan, my eyes searching the crowd desperately. I found him. He was standing near the back, half-hidden in the shadows behind Sarah. He wasn't rushing to defend me. He wasn't stopping her.

He was just watching. His face was a mask of cold indifference.

That was the moment my world shattered.

It wasn' t just a broken heart. It was a demolition.

Later, the full truth came out, a story pieced together from whispers and headlines. Ryan had married Sarah for one reason: revenge.

Years ago, before my mother became a renowned counselor, she was a lawyer. A damn good one. She had represented a client in a nasty divorce case, exposing the other woman' s affair and extensive financial fraud. That woman was Sarah Jenkins' s mother. The public shame, the financial ruin... it was too much. She drove her car off a bridge a week after the verdict. It was ruled an accident, but Sarah and Ryan saw it differently. They saw a murder, and my mother was the killer.

So Ryan built a life with me, a secret, beautiful life, just so he could destroy it in the most public way possible. He wanted to ruin my family the same way he believed my mother had ruined his.

He succeeded.

The story was everywhere online. The daughter of famous marriage counselors, a pregnant mistress at a sham wedding. The comments were brutal. My mother, who had built her life on integrity and helping others, couldn't take it. The stress, the shame, the thousands of hateful messages... she had a massive heart attack. She died reading a comment that called her a hypocrite who raised a whore.

My father found her. The shock sent him stumbling backward. He fell down the grand staircase in their home, the one I used to slide down as a kid. The fall didn' t kill him. It paralyzed him from the neck down. A quadriplegic.

Ryan wasn' t finished.

He used his influence to contact my university. He sent them the news articles, the doctored photos, the narrative he had created. He painted me as a manipulative homewrecker who had cheated her way through her studies.

They revoked my master' s degree in architecture. Then they revoked my university diploma.

Chloe Miller, the promising architect, was gone. In her place was Chloe Miller, the mistress.

My son, Ethan, was born a month later, two months premature. The stress had sent me into early labor. He was tiny, fragile, and came into a world that had already labeled him. He was the "illegitimate child."

And now, five years later, after all that, Ryan Stone was back.

He had found me.

He stood in front of my rundown apartment, looking like he owned the whole broken-down street. He said he wanted to give me and Ethan a family. He said he was sorry.

He said he wanted to fix what he had broken.

But some things can' t be fixed. They can only be survived.