Chapter 1

"Ava, are you sure about this? The Venice project is a huge commitment. Two years is a long time."

My boss, Mr. Thompson, was on the other end of the line. His voice was a mix of excitement and concern.

I looked out my office window at the New York skyline, a view I had worked my entire life to earn. "I'm sure, Mark. I've made up my mind. I'm accepting the assignment."

His tone immediately warmed up. "That's fantastic news! The firm is thrilled. We know you're the only one who can pull this off. Your designs are revolutionary."

It was the opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to lead a historic restoration project and make a real name for myself in the world of architecture. I had hesitated for weeks, held back by my life here.

"So, does this mean the wedding is on hold?" Mark asked, his voice casual.

That question hung in the air. The wedding. My engagement to Ethan Hayes.

"No," I said, my voice coming out sharper than I intended. "There is no wedding."

There was a silence on the line. I could almost hear Mark recalibrating.

"Oh. I'm... I'm sorry to hear that, Ava."

My knuckles were white from gripping the phone. A familiar ache started in my chest, a dull, heavy weight I' d been carrying for days. "It's fine. So, I'll be on the next flight out."

I ended the call before he could say anything else, before my voice could crack and reveal the truth. I wasn't fine. I was falling apart.

I sank into my chair, my gaze falling on Ethan's laptop, which he' d left on the corner of my desk yesterday. He was always forgetting things. I was always the one to remember. The one to pick up the pieces.

My hand moved on its own, opening the laptop. He' d asked me to upload some work files for him. I typed in the password-our anniversary. The irony was a bitter taste in my mouth.

As I searched for his work folder, my cursor hovered over another one. A folder simply labeled "C".

Curiosity, or maybe a darker instinct, made me click it.

It opened to reveal hundreds of subfolders. And inside them, thousands upon thousands of photos. All of one person. Chloe Davis.

His high school sweetheart.

My breath caught in my throat. There were pictures of her from high school, smiling in a cheerleading uniform. Pictures of her in college, laughing with friends on a beach. Recent pictures, professional-looking headshots, candid shots of her drinking coffee at an outdoor cafe. He had documented her entire life, a life I was not a part of.

I frantically searched the laptop for a folder with my name. There wasn't one. I searched for any pictures of us. I found a handful, maybe ten in total, from a company party two years ago. We were standing stiffly, a polite distance between us.

I remembered asking him once why we never took pictures.

"I'm not a photo person, Ava," he'd said with that easy, charming smile that used to make my heart flutter. "I prefer to live in the moment."

I had believed him. I had made excuses for him. For eight years, I had made excuses for everything.

A sick feeling washed over me. I felt like a fool. A complete and utter fool. The excuses I had built up over the years, the little walls I'd constructed to protect my heart, they all came crashing down at once. It was ridiculous. Pathetic.

I remembered my best friend, Sarah, pulling me aside a few years ago.

"Are you sure about him, Ava?" she had asked, her brow furrowed with worry. "He still talks about Chloe sometimes. It's like she's a ghost in the room."

I had laughed it off.

"Everyone has a past, Sarah. He loves me. We're building a future."

How naive I had been. How blindly optimistic. I had bet my entire life on him, on a future that was a lie.

Now I understood. I finally understood every hesitant glance, every private phone call he took in the other room, every time he avoided talking about our future in concrete terms. It all made a sickening kind of sense.

I picked up my phone to send him a text. A simple, clean break. We need to talk. I'm ending this.

But my thumb froze. I saw that he hadn't even opened the last message I sent him yesterday morning, the one about the final payment for the wedding caterer. He just didn't care.

Then, my eyes drifted to his open social media page on the laptop screen. He had just posted something a few minutes ago. It wasn't a picture, just a few words.

"The whale is back in the ocean."

It was a strange, cryptic phrase. But I knew what it meant. Moby Dick. The white whale. The obsessive, all-consuming pursuit. That' s what he called her when he thought I wasn't listening. Chloe was his white whale.

And she was back.

A wave of dizziness hit me, and I gripped the edge of the desk to steady myself. My legs felt weak, unable to hold my own weight. The whole world tilted on its axis.

I had always thought Ethan was just a little forgetful, a little emotionally reserved. I told myself his charm made up for his flaws. I thought he was a good man who was just a bit lost.

I was wrong. He wasn't lost. He was manipulative. He was cruel. And I had been his fool.

I glanced at the calendar on my wall. A big red circle was drawn around a date just three days away. Our wedding day.

The countdown I had been watching with joyful anticipation for months now felt like a ticking time bomb, set to blow up what was left of my life.