Chapter 1

Two years married to the day, and I was hanging a hundred meters up, wiping down glass, when the guy dangling beside me started snickering.

"Ollie, get a load of this!"

"You gotta hand it to the office crowd, they know how to have fun!"

I followed his finger.

Across the way, behind the window, a man and a woman were wrapped around each other, kissing like they couldn't stand to come up for air.

My hand paused on the squeegee. "Yeah, people get up to all kinds of things these days."

"Still better off with my wife. Honest, and good to me!"

"All right, enough with the wife worship, twenty-four seven."

He dug his phone out of his pocket.

"Free show. I'm recording it, gonna savor it tonight."

I laughed and shook my head, ready to get back to work.

But when the woman lifted her face, I froze.

The next second, I clamped down on his hand and forced the words out.

"Man, stop filming..."

"...that's my wife."

...

"Ollie, quit messing around..." His hand stalled in midair.

He looked down at his phone, then back up at the glass, his mouth working but nothing coming out.

"Ollie, that... that's really your wife?"

My throat went tight. I nodded.

"Ollie, I didn't know..."

His face was all awkwardness and pity. He jammed the phone back into his pocket and scrambled his platform sideways like he was fleeing.

"I—I didn't mean anything by it, I'll go clean over there."

I let him go. I just stared at that glass, wiped so clean it shone.

Behind it, the two of them were still pressed together.

The woman who'd sworn over and over she'd love me forever was cooing sweet things at a balding man.

He gave her a light pat, and Kathryn Dotson turned her head and kissed him back like she couldn't get enough.

I looked down at the wretched reflection of myself in the glass.

The hard hat had flattened my hair, my sweat-soaked work uniform stuck to me, filthy and reeking of cheap sweat.

There was a fire jammed in my throat, and my temples throbbed, over and over.

Once, I'd walked tall too, the youngest boxing champion ever to stand on top of the world.

And now?

A dead ringer for a bottom-rung laborer.

Three years ago, I fell for Kathryn at first sight.

I asked her what kind of man she liked, and her eyes curved up when she smiled.

"Me? I like a man who's got that manly edge."

All for that one worthless line.

Like an idiot, I threw away a fortune worth billions and fought with my family until they cut me off.

Just to prove my laughable love mattered more than anything.

Just for that damn "manly edge" she talked about.

I started from nothing. Broke my nose, cracked my ribs, stood in the ring covered in blood, bet my life on it, and finally clawed my way to the top of the world.

I thought I'd won the world, and won her too.

But less than a year after I retired, this woman burned through my two hundred million in prize money and endorsements down to nothing.

And saddled me with hundreds of millions in debt on top of it.

To pay it off, I comforted my wife with one hand and secretly took up high-rise window cleaning with the other.

Now here I was, breaking my back a hundred meters up for five hundred bucks a day, while she was in there kissing some balding man like she couldn't get enough.

My stomach heaved, and I slammed the squeegee against the glass in a fury.

"Kathryn, how could you do this to me?"

But no matter how hard I banged, the people inside didn't react at all.

The other guy panicked and fumbled to grab my arm.

"Ollie! Stop it! We're up high here!"

"Get off me!"

I shook him off and drove my palm hard against the glass.

Inside the office, Rufus Rodriguez suddenly looked up, glanced out through the glass, and his eyes locked straight onto my face.

He faltered for a second, then narrowed his eyes and stared at me for a few beats.

Then he reached out, pulled Kathryn in tighter, and deliberately tugged her right up to the glass.

The next second, Rufus slid the window open, pointed at me outside, and gave a mocking smile.

"Baby, look..."

"Guess who's here?"