Chapter 1

At the banquet for our seventh wedding anniversary, I reached into the inner pocket of my husband's suit jacket and pulled out a divorce plan.

The title on the first page read: How to Force a Wife With No Financial Contribution Out With Nothing.

Five minutes later, Jackson Fox took my hand and led me up onto the stage, his eyes red as he told a hall full of the city's guests:

"Vivi went through the hard years with me. I will never fail her, not in this life."

The applause below thundered.

Everyone said I was lucky, married to a man who made it big and still remembered the wife who'd starved beside him.

Only I knew the truth.

He thought I was thirty now, not young, not pretty, not one to sweet-talk him, no longer able to give him the emotional lift he wanted.

He wanted to kick me out, and go on playing the devoted husband.

The next day, a twenty-two-year-old male college student moved in next door to my flower shop.

The first time he met me, he said the one thing my husband hadn't remembered in seven years:

"Ann, you're allergic to yam, aren't you?"

I looked at his young, clean face, and it came to me all at once.

The man Jackson had lined up for me to have an affair with had arrived.

......

The night Jackson threw me the redo wedding, half the business district of Deerfield turned out.

The hotel was filled with champagne roses, my favorite, and the screens looped through old photos of us.

In one of them, twenty-three-year-old me sat beside Jackson at a night-market stall eating a beef noodle bowl, back when he owed a hundred and seventy-six thousand.

Back then, with creditors cornering him at the door of our rented place, he'd still shielded me and said:

"Ann Henson, just wait a little longer for me. I swear I'll give you a good life."

I waited seven years.

Waited for him to go from a broke nobody to the owner of Jingcheng Floral Arts, and waited until he was finally willing to give me a grand wedding.

The host asked him: "Mr. Fox, over these years, who are you most grateful to?"

Jackson looked at me, and his eyes went red in an instant.

"My wife."

"Without Vivi, there'd be no me today."

The applause below thundered, and someone held up a phone to livestream it.

"Mr. Fox is so devoted."

"Made it big and still didn't forget the wife who suffered with him. That's what a good man is."

I stood at his side, wearing the diamond necklace he'd picked out with his own hands, smiling like a truly happy wife.

But ten minutes earlier, while I was straightening his suit in the lounge, I'd pulled a document from his inner pocket.

How to Get a Full-Time Wife With No Financial Contribution Out With Nothing, and Keep It Respectable.

A few notes beneath it were bolded:

"After marriage the wife's social connections are weak. Fabricate evidence of an emotional betrayal to build public pressure."

"After the affair, walk her away with nothing. The key is to force her to sign on her own."

Jackson's voice came from outside the door: "Vivi, are you ready? The press is waiting for the couple's photo."

The door pushed open. He saw I looked unwell and immediately crouched to rub my ankle.

"Wearing heels this high, your feet are hurting again, aren't they?"

The photographer stood in the doorway, and the flash went off at just the right moment.

He tilted his head up to look at me, so gentle you couldn't find a flaw in it.

"Bear with it a little longer. After tonight, the whole city will know how much I love you."

So it turned out that when a man wants to destroy you, he can act out love this convincingly too.

After the banquet, Jackson had been drinking.

Kay Hughes, the operations director, helped him into the car.

She was twenty-six, young and pretty, in a champagne-colored gown, and standing beside him she looked like the kind of respectable image he actually wanted.

Halfway down the road, Jackson's phone buzzed.

The screen lit up beside the armrest box.

"Mr. Fox, the target has been confirmed. Deerfield University Law School, first-year grad student, Blake James, twenty-two, young and clean, matches Ms. Henson's preferences."

The next message popped up right after:

"Moving in next door to Springhill Florals tomorrow, approaching under the name of a pro bono legal aid center. Chat records, photos, and hotel surveillance can all be arranged later."

Jackson's eyes snapped open, and he quickly killed the screen.

"What are you looking at?"

I asked calmly: "Work message?"

He stared at me for two seconds, then smiled.

"Supplier business. I've got the household, and I've got the company too. All you need to do is be Mrs. Fox and rest easy."

I looked toward the car window. The glass reflected my thirty-year-old face.

Jackson smoothed back the hair at my temple.

"Vivi, you've been too tired lately. Don't let your mind run wild."