Chapter 3

None of them cared, even if this man was convinced I was a gold digger and only wanted to marry me so he'd have a free nanny.

"Trevor, I'm not marrying him. Stop trying to talk me into it."

I hung up.

The phone rang again. It was Aunt Linda. I didn't answer.

Right after her came my cousin, then a few relatives I barely ever spoke to. More than a dozen calls came in one after another, and they all said the same thing.

Marry Martin Campbell.

They scolded me for being so willful, for playing hard to get. They said I should think of Ivy, and not ruin the bond between our two families.

A dull ache throbbed in my temples.I turned off my phone.

The apartment finally went quiet.

I sat on the couch and stared at the empty living room. It was my rented one-bedroom, about five hundred and forty square feet, simply furnished. But it was my own place.

In my past life, once I married and moved to the Campbell Mansion--all thirty-two hundred square feet of it—I'd had no space of my own. Every day revolved around the stove and the child. Even sitting quietly for ten minutes was a luxury.

Martin was always on guard against me and never let me spend much. He said household expenses were high, so we should save wherever we could.

I would agonize for ages over a forty-dollar blouse.

Yet the burial plot he bought for my sister cost a full seven hundred thousand dollars. Beloved Wife, engraved on the headstone.

Every year on the anniversary of her death, he would cling to that headstone, sobbing as if his heart were being torn out. He said she was the love of his life.

At that moment, standing beside him, my hands and feet cold as ice, I felt like an outsider. In his heart, I was nothing but a money-grubbing nanny.

I lay down on the couch and closed my eyes.

In this life, I would never let myself live like that again.

***

Early the next morning, the doorbell rang.

I opened the door to find my mother standing outside with Ivy.

The child's eyes were swollen from crying. The moment she saw me, she threw her arms around my legs.

"Aunt Vanessa, don't you want me anymore?"

Mom used the moment to step inside, then pulled Ivy in front of her.

"Go on, tell your aunt what you said at home."

Ivy glanced at her, then turned and tugged at my sleeve. "Aunt Vanessa, please marry Daddy. I promise I'll be good from now on."

In my past life, she had said the exact same thing.

But later, when all I did was remind her to do her homework, she shoved a scalding bowl of soup across the table and shouted.

"You're not my real mom! You only got in because my mom died. What gives you the right to boss me around?"

The hot soup splashed all over my hand, leaving me frozen in place. But Martin didn't even look up.

"Quit acting like her mother. She's just a kid, go easy on her."

Now, that same hand was clutching me again.

I gently pulled free and crouched down to look at her.

"Ivy, I can still come see you even if I don't marry your daddy."

She blinked, taken aback.

"Then who's going to make my healthy meals? Who's going to take me to school and pick me up?"

"Your daddy will hire a nanny to take care of that."

"A nanny won't understand me. And Daddy runs a big company with hundreds of people. He gets tired from working so hard to earn all that money."

I looked at her. "Well, I have a studio to run, and I get tired too."

Ivy pouted. After a moment, she muttered under her breath, "Grandma says your crummy studio doesn't even make thirty thousand dollars a year, and you don't have any kids of your own anyway, so that little bit of money is useless."

Mom's hand paused on her water glass.

"Kids only half-hear things. Don't take it seriously."

Ivy hurried on. "I can be your daughter! If you move into my house and cook for me and sleep with me at night, I'll call you Mom when we're out in public!"

When we're out in public.

Those words brought back my past life.

Back then, I went to her elite private school for a parent-teacher conference. The teacher praised her mother for being so attentive, and Ivy smiled and accepted it.

But back at home, she saw the photo of the two of us on the table, pried the frame open right away, pulled out the picture, and tore it to pieces.