Chapter 2

Hazel POV

"Chace, the baby… what if something happens to our baby? I'm so scared."

Ivory's voice was a broken sob, perfectly pitched to carry. Loud enough for me, still on the ground, to hear every calculated word.

The word "baby" lanced through me. A phantom ache, sharp and vicious, radiated from my own womb. The baby Chace and I had lost. The miscarriage at eleven weeks, the blood and the hospital lights and the way he had held my hand and cried. The loss that had shattered me into pieces I had spent years trying to glue back together.

It was all part of the lie. The grief he had performed so perfectly, the tears he had shed at my bedside—all of it had been an act. While I was losing our child, he was probably already planning his new life. Already shopping for a ring for his secretary.

Chace's face, already contorted with rage, became something crueler. He was completely captivated by her performance, unable to see the strings.

Suddenly, Ivory tore herself from his arms with a dramatic cry. "I can't do this!" She was running now, heading toward the grand staircase of the mansion. "I'm getting rid of it! I won't bring a child into a life where we're haunted by her!"

A masterstroke.

It left him no choice but to be the protector. The hero. The man who would save his pregnant wife from the crazy woman who had crashed their party.

"Ivory!" he bellowed, spinning to chase after her. He stormed past me, his expensive shoe kicking my fallen phone and sending it skittering across the stone patio. The screen, already cracked from the fall, went dark.

He didn't stop.

As he passed, he gave me a shove with his free hand. Not a push to move me out of his way—a casual, contemptuous push. Like swatting a fly. Like discarding a piece of trash.

The force sent me sprawling sideways. The back of my neck slammed into the sharp corner of an overturned champagne table. A flash of white-hot pain, followed by a sickeningly warm trickle of blood down my collar.

The world went fuzzy at the edges.

Through the haze, I saw him take the stairs two at a time, his entire being focused on the weeping woman above. His wife. His real wife. The one who mattered.

He didn't look back.

A collective gasp went through the party guests. No one moved to help. Cole Sterling took a half-step forward, then stopped, his face a mask of conflict. For one moment, I thought he might actually do something. But then he looked at the stairs where Chace had disappeared, and he chose. He chose his friend. He chose the lie.

I lay there on the cold stone, the smell of spilled champagne and my own blood filling my nostrils. The irony was so bitter it tasted like acid on my tongue. I had spent six years destroying myself for a man who would step over my bleeding body to comfort his new wife. Six years of guilt, of self-loathing, of therapy bills and sleepless nights and the slow, grinding erosion of everything I had ever been.

For a man who had never existed.

Two uniformed security guards appeared above me. They didn't offer a hand.

"Ma'am, you need to leave," one said, his voice flat and bored. Just another crazy woman. Just another party crasher. He probably dealt with one every weekend.

They hauled me to my feet, one on each arm. The movement sent a fresh wave of pain through my head, and I felt the blood from my neck soaking into the collar of my dress. They escorted me through the gawking crowd—a gauntlet of pitying stares and whispered judgments—out the gates, and deposited me on the curb next to my car.

Like a bag of trash.

I leaned against the cool metal of my car, my legs shaking so hard I wasn't sure they would hold me. My neck throbbed in time with my heartbeat. I fumbled for my keys, my fingers clumsy and slick with blood. The drive to Cedars-Sinai was pure adrenaline—I don't remember making it, don't remember any of the turns or lights. I just remember the pain and the ringing in my ears and the taste of salt.

In the emergency room, a doctor with tired eyes and a gentle voice told me the cut was deep. He stitched it up, his movements quick and efficient. Eleven stitches. He asked me how it happened.

I said nothing. What could I say? My dead husband shoved me at his anniversary party. They would have committed me on the spot.

The needle piercing my skin felt like a penance. Each stitch, a year of my wasted life. One for each year I had mourned a living man.

I was sitting on a hard plastic chair in the hallway, the antiseptic smell burning my nose, when he appeared.

Chace.

He stood before me, his suit immaculate, his hair perfectly in place. The chaos of the party might as well have happened to someone else, in some other lifetime. He looked like a man who had never been inconvenienced a day in his life.

He didn't ask about my neck. He didn't look at the bandage. He threw a folded printout onto my lap.

TMZ.

The headline screamed: Tech Mogul Chace Woodward Harassed by Crazed Ex at Anniversary Party—Pregnant Wife Injured.

The article painted me as a delusional stalker, a woman who had invented an entire relationship in her head. It included a blurry photo of me throwing the wine—me, caught mid-throw, looking wild and unhinged. It didn't show whose face the wine had landed on. It didn't mention the eleven stitches in my neck.

"Did you call them?" His voice was low and menacing, barely contained fury vibrating beneath the surface. "Are you trying to ruin us?"

I stared at him. At this stranger wearing the face of the man I had loved. At this man who had held me while I sobbed over our lost child, who had probably already been planning his escape.

"No," I whispered. "I didn't call anyone."

He let out a short, ugly laugh. He pulled a checkbook from his jacket—the same leather checkbook I had given him for our second anniversary—scribbled something, and tore out a check. He tossed it at me. It fluttered onto my lap, landing face up.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

"Here. Take it. It's more than you deserve." He straightened the lapels of his jacket. "Now get out of my life. For good this time."

I didn't look at the amount. I didn't touch the check. I just looked at his eyes, searching for a flicker of the man I had married. The man who used to bring me coffee in bed and leave stupid love notes on the bathroom mirror. The man who had cried at our wedding and told me I had saved his life.

"Did you ever love me, Chace?"

The question hit a nerve. His handsome face twisted into something ugly and defensive.

"Love?" He leaned down, his face close to mine, his breath smelling of expensive whiskey. "If you hadn't insisted on celebrating your stupid birthday, we never would have been on that road. You were the reason everything fell apart. You and your need for attention."

He said it.

The one thing that was sacred. The source of my six years of guilt. The thing I had whispered to my therapist in a voice so small I barely recognized it: If I hadn't wanted that birthday dinner, he wouldn't have been driving that road.

The blood drained from my face. The air in my lungs turned to ice. For six years, I had carried that guilt like a stone in my chest. I had replayed that day a thousand times, imagining a thousand different choices. If I hadn't wanted the cake from that specific bakery. If we had left an hour earlier. If I had just let my birthday pass without mention.

And now he was using it against me. The thing I had confessed to him in my darkest moments, the guilt I had shared with him when I still thought he was a memory. He was wielding it like a weapon.

He saw my reaction. A flicker of satisfaction crossed his face. He had found the wound that still bled, and he had pressed his thumb into it.

"You think you were special?" he continued, straightening up and smoothing the lapels of his jacket. His voice was casual now, almost bored. "You were a mistake. A chapter I needed to close. The only thing you ever did for me was make me realize what I actually wanted."

A single, hot tear escaped and slid down my cheek. He watched it fall with cold detachment. No flicker of guilt. No shadow of the man I had loved.

"By the way," he said, his tone shifting to something even more casual, which made the words infinitely more cruel. "Your mother. Eleanor. Her treatment at this very hospital—the Woodward Foundation has been covering the costs, hasn't it?"

My heart stopped. The world stopped.

"If I see one more headline… if you so much as breathe in Ivory's direction again…" He paused, letting the threat hang in the sterile air. "I will pull all of her funding. Immediately. You know how expensive her treatment is. And with her heart condition… well, you know she can't last a day without it."