Chapter 3

Blair's POV

It took some doing, but I was finally in a taxi. I had the driver stop at the office first—twenty minutes to hand in my access card and clear my desk while the floor was still empty—and then I went home. The penthouse downtown was dim and silent when I let myself in.

I went into the master bathroom, took a bottle of surgical alcohol and a few cotton pads from the cabinet, and looked down at the ring of purple finger-marks around my right wrist. Without meaning to, I thought of college—of the time I was hurrying to class and skinned my knee on the steps. It was barely a scratch. Easton was so frightened for me that he walked me all the way to the campus clinic.

That day it was his hands that dabbed the iodine on, one careful touch at a time. Now the alcohol bit into the broken skin and pulled me back out of the memory—and I was alone in a dim, airless bedroom, the only one left in it.

For six months, this space had not belonged to me.

Arianna's expensive perfume sat on my dressing table, dropped carelessly beside my jewelry box. Her cashmere shawl was draped over the chaise in the corner—she had left it behind, she said, while staying late to help Easton with the resort expansion file. All summer long, Easton had brought her back here, three times, five times, each time on the pretext of an urgent family matter, parading her presence through our home simply to watch my reaction.

【Get angry, Blair. Tell her to get out. Throw her perfume in the trash. Claim what's yours!】Every time, his heart shouted exactly that.

And every time, I gave ground. I watched him pour her vintage from our private cellar. I watched him order her favorite takeout. I watched him give the tenderness he had never once given me in ten years to an assistant who had been on the payroll eight months. I had long since understood: this elaborate cruelty was not a cry for help. It was a man drowning in the pleasure of tormenting me.

I dragged two large hard-shell suitcases down from the top shelf of the walk-in closet.

I did not touch a single one of the designer gowns Easton had bought so he could show off his trophy wife during the social season. I took only the clothes I had bought with my own salary from the corporate PR department: a few wool trousers, a few plain turtlenecks, cotton shirts, and a couple of comfortable boots. From the bottom drawer of the nightstand I dug out my passport, my birth certificate, and my medical records, and zipped them into the inner pocket of my handbag.

Erasing every trace of the six years I had lived in that apartment took me less than forty minutes.

As I pulled the zipper shut on the second suitcase, the lock on the front door clicked.

Laughter came down the hall—Arianna's voice, bright and a little breathless—followed by the heavy, uneven tread of Easton's shoes.

The bedroom door was thrown open.

Easton slumped against the doorframe, reeking of Scotch and cigars. His tie hung loose around his collar like a frayed rope. Arianna came in behind him with his coat over her arm, my diamond bracelet still on her wrist—her eyes swept the room and came to rest on the two neatly packed suitcases beside the bed.

Easton's eyes went wide. The drunken haze burned off in an instant, replaced by something instinctive and violently afraid.

【No. No, no, no. She's really packing? She called movers? Where is she going? She can't leave this room. This room is mine, even the air in here is mine!】

"What is this supposed to mean?" His tongue stumbled; he clamped his jaw and dragged up a sneer. He pushed himself off the doorframe and lurched three steps toward me. "Still playing the runaway bride, Blair? Isn't ruining our trip enough for you? Now you have to throw another tantrum?"

Arianna stepped forward, her voice soft with concern. "Blair, please don't do this. After you left, Mr. McGowen drank most of a bottle of Macallan. He was worried sick about you. Look—he even had me run out and buy ointment for your wrist."

She held up a small paper bag, fixing me with that almost theatrical innocence. The diamond bracelet on her wrist threw out a hard, cold glitter under the light.

"You don't need to trouble yourselves," I said, looking past Easton's shoulder at the blank wall, my face empty. "The taxi has heat. I'm packing because our marriage is over."

A sharp, ugly laugh burst out of Easton and rang up into the double-height ceiling.

"Over? Because I gave a junk bracelet to Arianna?" He came closer, looking down at me, his breath hot and sour with whiskey. "You think you can just walk out of the McGowen house? Blair, you're thirty-one! You've got no real assets, no standing without my circle, and you can't even have a child! Who exactly do you think is going to want you? A broken, barren woman, throwing a fit over a seat?"

The words "can't have a child" spread through the cold bedroom air like poison.

Behind him, Arianna lowered her eyes, and the corner of her mouth curled in a small, satisfied smirk.

A hot, suffocating nausea turned over in my stomach.

Six years ago, in our first winter as husband and wife, Easton had been walking on the frozen lake below the Aspen villa when a panic attack hit him, hard. The darkness of the tree line had dragged up the memory of being abducted as a child. His breathing went ragged; he staggered onto thin ice, and one leg went through into the black, freezing water.

I went in after him without a second thought. I dragged his dead weight out of the lake with my bare hands, then lay on top of him and gave him my body heat until the villa's caretaker found us forty minutes later.

Easton survived with mild hypothermia.

I spent three weeks in intensive care with acute pelvic peritonitis and severe frostbite. The infection had ravaged my reproductive system. When I finally woke, the doctor told me the scar tissue was extensive, and my chances of conceiving naturally were under one percent.

For five years I swallowed hundreds of bitter fertility pills. I went through three painful laparoscopic surgeries, and my belly was covered in small round scars; my veins ran purple from the daily hormone injections—all of it to undo the price I had paid for saving his life.

And now he had taken my sacrifice and used it as a blade, and cut my throat with it.

"I can't have children because I pulled you out of that lake, Easton," I said quietly. My voice did not shake, but my knuckles went white around the handle of the suitcase. "You know it. You know better than anyone the exact day and the exact hour my body was destroyed."

Easton flinched as though he had been slapped; his face went white.

【Shut up. Don't say it. Please don't say it. I know. I hate myself every single day. I'm the monster. I took your child. Don't look at me like that, Blair. Please, God, let me take it back.】

"Mr. McGowen was traumatized, Blair," Arianna cut in softly, laying a hand on Easton's arm. "You can't blame him for one accident for the rest of his life. He's carried the guilt of that night for years. You're using his trauma as a weapon so you can justify walking out. That's not fair to him."

Easton looked down at her hand on his sleeve. The guilt that had torn across his face vanished, replaced by a frantic need to seize back control.

"Arianna's right," he snarled, his voice ugly with shame and rage. "You bring up that lake every chance you get to make me feel guilty! I'm sick of being held hostage by your so-called sacrifice! You think you're some tragic martyr, Blair? You're nothing but an ungrateful leech!"

He lunged forward, grabbed the handle of my packed suitcase, and flung it off the bed.

Under the violence of the pull the zipper burst. The case hit the hardwood with a heavy thud, and the sweaters, trousers, and underwear I had folded so carefully scattered across the floor. Easton kicked at the pile, his heavy leather shoes grinding into my clean clothes.

"Nothing I gave you leaves this house!" he roared.

As he stamped through the scattered luggage, a small, dark velvet box rolled out from under a wool cardigan and came to rest against his shoe.

Easton froze. He bent down and picked it up.

The deep blue velvet had faded, its corners worn smooth. Inside lay an antique sapphire pendant in an emerald cut, ringed with a border of tiny rose-cut diamonds, hung on a fine platinum chain.

My breath stopped.

"Give it back," I said, stepping forward, my voice urgent. "That belonged to my mother."

Easton flipped the lid open with a snap. The sapphire burned under the chandelier like a drop of frozen deep water.

A cruel, triumphant smile spread slowly across his mouth.

"Your mother sold this pendant to a pawnshop to pay for her chemo before she died," Easton said, his voice heavy with contempt. "I bought it back at Sotheby's three years ago for four million dollars. The receipt is in my name, Blair. The wire came from my personal account. It's mine."