Chapter 3

"Yeah, that's right! Julian spends every single holiday with me first! He gave me these flowers two days ago!"

The woman seemed to regain her footing, sneering as she looked down at me. "I get every holiday two days before you do. Don't you feel like a pathetic failure?"

I looked at her without a word. It was just pathetic.

Arguing with trash like this was a complete waste of breath.

Clutching the bouquet, I stepped backward and slammed the door right in her face.

Julian and I had met in college.

Counting on my fingers, this year marked our exact tenth year together. Back in school, we were the only two students in our class on financial aid. He was a broke boy from a rural backwater, and I was raised by a sick, single mother.

We both took work-study jobs behind the counters of the campus dining hall, and that was where our eyes first met.

At first, we were just coworkers who barely spoke. Until one afternoon, a cruel frat boy pulled down my mask while I was serving food. He whistled loudly, shouting to the entire cafeteria that the department beauty queen was dishing out gravy, telling everyone to come look.

Not to be vain, but I was exceptionally pretty, voted the department crush during freshman year. Back then, I was intensely shy. Having my mask ripped off in front of a staring crowd turned my entire face bright red.

Worse, he didn't stop there. He leaned over the counter and dropped a filthy slur:

"Hey gorgeous, why are you selling food with a face like that? You could make ten times more selling your body."

The crude humiliation made my mind go completely blank. Several boys around him burst into raucous laughter.

The next second, Julian leaped clean over the dining hall counter, tackling the guy to the linoleum floor and beating him to a pulp.

After that day, Julian and I grew inseparable. Falling in love was as natural as breathing.

Yet looking down at the finalized divorce papers resting on my coffee table, my eyes stung with tears.

It would be a lie to say it didn't hurt. A decade of history is a hard pill to swallow. We had crawled through hell together to get here.

After graduation, we launched a startup from scratch. In our darkest days, we crammed ourselves into a moldy basement room for three hundred bucks a month, breathing in stale mildew, surviving on dollar-store instant ramen and fifty-cent discounted buns for weeks on end.

And against all odds, in that squalor, we built an empire.

I used to believe that the cliché of men turning rotten once they tasted wealth would never apply to Julian. But in two short weeks, my entire world had been dismantled.

Only now did I realize that Julian and I could survive rock bottom together, but we were never meant to share the view from the top.

At seven in the evening, Julian unlocked the front door right on the dot.

To be fair, over the years, he had performed the role of a devoted husband flawlessly.

I had set a seven-thirty curfew, and unless there was an unavoidable board meeting, he was always through the door by seven. Once our company stabilized, I stepped back from day-to-day operations to pursue my own passions at home. Julian fully supported it, rushing home every evening to cook gourmet dinners, constantly teasing that he was going to pamper me plump.

Throughout all these years, he had never once raised his voice at me, quietly taking on most of the heavy chores. Who could have ever guessed that this gentle, picture-perfect husband was playing house with another woman on the side?

"Babe?" Catching sight of me on the sofa, Julian called out with a cautious, timid tone. When I gave no response, he circled the couch carrying a bakery box. Setting the cake down, he dropped onto one knee in front of me and pulled out a velvet box containing a dazzling diamond necklace.

I recognized it instantly. When he accompanied me window-shopping last month, I had lingered on it for a few seconds.

The price tag was roughly one hundred and twenty thousand dollars.

I looked down at Julian. As wealth accumulated, he had evolved into an impeccably groomed gentleman. His eyes were deep and refined, and the gaze he fixed on me was still brimming with tender affection.

A wave of dissonance washed over me. It felt almost impossible that the man begging at my knees was the same man raising another woman's son across town.

"Happy Valentine's Day, babe."

Seeing that I didn't snap or push him away, Julian let out a subtle sigh of relief. He stood up, reaching his hands out to clasp the diamond necklace around my neck.