Chapter 1

1

My best friend, Chloe, was nursing a broken heart, and her remedy? A night at a male escort club. I was there for moral support, mostly to stop her from doing anything too crazy.

The door across the hall was ajar. I saw my boyfriend, Ethan, wrapped around a girl, lost in a passionate kiss. The girl looked up, and her features… they were eerily similar to my own, years ago.

Later, people would laugh at Ethan. "Sarah's having her second kid, and he's still not over her."

……

"The faster I replace men, the faster I outrun heartbreak!" Chloe, my best friend, declared, draped between two escorts, her eyes red-rimmed from alcohol. She nudged me. "Sarah, you and Ethan have been together for ten years. Why hasn't he proposed yet? Is he seeing someone else?"

Ethan and I hadn't been spending much time together lately, and the spark had dimmed. But ten years was a long time, and I trusted him.

I shook my head. "He's not like that. He's just busy with work. No time for wedding planning."

As soon as I said that, another escort walked in. The half-open door across the hall offered a clear view of the scene inside. A man and a woman embraced, their passion palpable even from a distance. Ordinarily, I'd just think, "Good for them." But the man's back… it looked exactly like my "workaholic" boyfriend's.

I froze.

One of the escorts noticed my reaction and chuckled. "Got your eye on Mr. Stone, huh? I'd give up if I were you. He's a one-woman man. Besides Ms. Young, he keeps his distance from everyone."

Ethan, so busy he sent his assistant, James, to the hospital when I had a car accident, was supposedly a regular at a club with another woman? I clung to a sliver of hope. It was probably just a coincidence, a similar build, the same last name.

But I wasn't one to avoid confrontation. I pulled out my phone and called Ethan.

The man in the other room's phone rang. He silenced it, typed a quick message, and returned to kissing the girl, his hand slipping under her shirt. The intensity made me blush.

Then I saw the text on my phone: "In a meeting." My blood ran cold. Had he been doing this every time he'd brushed me off with a "work emergency"?