Chapter 3

"What gives you the right to hurt an innocent person like this?"

"Olivia, get out and apologize."

His grip on my wrist hurt.

I looked at this man who had once had eyes only for me, and my heart went cold inch by inch.

Then I slapped him again.

"You want me to apologize?"

I looked at his stunned face.

"Dream on."

I unbuckled his seat belt for him, pointed at the door, and said, "Get out."

He looked at me as if I were completely unreasonable and threw down one last sentence.

"Don't regret this."

Then he slammed the door and left.

Through the window, I watched him catch up to Vanessa. He grabbed her hand, and after she struggled a few times, she collapsed into his arms and cried as if her heart were breaking.

It felt as if something had split open inside me. A cold wind blew straight through the crack.

It hurt so much my hands trembled on the steering wheel. When I drove past the two of them embracing in the cold, I clearly saw Vanessa look at me with a small, triumphant smile.

Without a word, she told me the result.

She had won.

Ethan and I fell into a cold war. His friends came one after another to persuade me to make peace.

"Olivia, Ethan just feels sorry for her. It's not love. Don't overthink it."

Our mutual friends all said the same thing.

"It wasn't easy for you two to get where you are. Last time Ethan got drunk, he was still calling your name. He said Vanessa reminds him of the old you. He just wants to make up for what you suffered back then."

I listened as they brought up our past.

I remembered how Ethan and I had built everything from nothing.

I remembered how, as children, we lined up outside shelters for charity meals.

I remembered the day our parents died in the same car accident. We became children without parents. The relatives who were supposed to be our guardians took everything our parents left us, and then we became children passed from foster home to foster home, abandoned again and again.

It was Ethan who held me tightly and told me, "Olivia, I will give you a home."

Back then, home was a distant word.

Among thousands of lit windows, not one belonged to us.

Every apartment in the city was impossibly expensive, yet Ethan put me in one of the most luxurious lakefront penthouses in Chicago. He filled that place with memories that belonged to the two of us.

He was even afraid I would bump into the corners of the furniture, so he covered every sharp edge with soft padding.

Ethan always said, "Olivia, in my heart, you will always be a child."

"I want Olivia to be the happiest princess in the world."

"My little princess."

And now, our friends were telling me, "What man doesn't mess up sometimes? Ethan is already better than most. He doesn't gamble, he doesn't keep mistresses, and his whole heart is still with you. Olivia, stop making trouble."

I understood.

They were Ethan's mediators. He had sent them to give me a reason to lower my head. If I took the step they offered, we could pretend, like we always had after every fight, that nothing had happened and move on.

But this time, I suddenly did not want to.

I was stubborn.

So stubborn that when I saw Vanessa's newly updated Instagram story, I could not look away.

In it, she was sitting with her child on the Ferris wheel, and the caption read:

[Noah says a father doesn't have to be related by blood. As long as there is love, we are family.]

In one corner of the photo was a hand with long, defined fingers.

I knew that hand.

I had looked at it for nearly thirty years.

The ring on that hand was one I had designed myself and Ethan had custom-made.

It was our wedding ring.