Chapter 1

On the first day of dropping my daughter off at Briarwood Elite Academy, the admissions staff told me she wasn't on the roster.

I immediately called my husband, Garrett.

He had handled all her enrollment paperwork himself. How could she possibly be disqualified?

Garrett sounded pathetic over the line.

"I'm so sorry, honey. Our company's assets didn't meet the academy's financial threshold."

"I didn't want to break your heart, so I kept it to myself. It's all my fault for not working hard enough to give our daughter the best start in life."

I hung up without another word and called my billionaire father, who happened to sit on the academy's board of directors.

Then, I instructed my attorney to draft a divorce agreement.

I wanted to see exactly which little bastard had stolen the seat my father specifically reserved for his granddaughter.

1

My father worked fast. Within an hour, he sent over a complete file detailing Garrett's infidelity.

Looking at the photo of the young boy who was a spitting image of my husband, I could barely breathe.

The boy, Jackson, was the exact same age as my daughter, Lily. That meant the man I thought loved me endlessly had betrayed me while I was pregnant.

If not for this coincidence, I would have been kept in the dark forever.

I searched the mother's name, Rochelle Mercer, on social media. Her feed was packed with snapshots of their perfect little family.

On Valentine's Day, she had posted a silhouette of two lovers kissing.

Her caption read: "Years together, and this man is still the hopeless romantic I fell for."

On that very night, Garrett had claimed he had an emergency business trip, ditching the candlelight dinner I spent all afternoon preparing.

On the coldest night of winter, she posted a video of a man anxiously nursing a child in a private hospital suite.

Even from just a view of his back, I instantly recognized Garrett.

That same night, I was sitting in an emergency room, watching Lily burn up with a 104-degree fever.

The evening before, Lily had accidentally smudged one of Garrett's contracts. He flew into a violent rage and locked her inside a freezing storage closet, triggering her severe fever from sheer terror.

I had wept beside our burning child while he grabbed his keys and claimed he had to work late at the office.

It turned out his late-night overtime was spent tending to his secret love child.

Ever since Lily was born, Garrett had treated her with brutal strictness.

If she made a simple arithmetic mistake, he struck her soft palms with a wooden ruler until they swelled. If she made a minor mess, he forced her to kneel on the hard floor for hours.

Whenever he spoke to her, his tone was freezing cold.

More than once, I questioned whether he simply despised our daughter.

Every time, he would frown and play the devoted father.

"Lily is going to inherit my company one day. I am hard on her because she's my heir."

"You don't want me to spoil her into some fragile flower, do you?"

I had bought into his lies, genuinely believing he was preparing her for the future.

Yet the gentle adoration he showed his illegitimate son in those videos felt like a vicious slap across my face.

He didn't believe in tough love. He just hated my daughter.

Garrett's call interrupted my thoughts, his voice dripping with honey.

"Honey, I found another private preschool for Lily. I'll take the morning off and go with you the day after tomorrow."

I played along and agreed softly. Once the line went dead, I pulled up Rochelle's latest post.

Tomorrow morning, their family of three was scheduled for orientation at Briarwood Elite Academy.

A cold glint flashed in my eyes. Nobody steals what belongs to my daughter.

As for Garrett, since he chose betrayal, I was going to strip him of everything until he was left with nothing.