Chapter 1

At the graduation ceremony, I exposed my husband's affair with a female student in front of everyone.

Unable to bear the humiliation, she threw herself from the eighteenth floor to prove her innocence.

I became the one they blamed for her death. The guilt broke me — severe depression.

I climbed to the rooftop more times than I could count, ready to pay with my life.

Every single time, it was Liam who pulled me back — arms locked around me, voice low and steady against my ear.

"Don't be afraid. I'll stay with you. Always."

Even as the world turned against me, he stood in front of me and took the blows.

"Ava is my wife. Whatever she carries, I carry too."

Slowly, I began to wonder if I'd been wrong about the two of them from the start.

Then Stella's letter arrived.

I shattered completely.

[Ava, I'm sorry. Liam and I lied to you.]

[We staged the whole thing — provoked you into a scene, then faked my death to disappear. Ten months later, I gave birth to his child.]

[We had to protect the baby. We had to protect my reputation. You were the only option. I'm sorry it had to be you.]

That night, my hands shook as I reached for the sleeping pills.

I was crying as I forced them down my throat, handful after handful.

Liam jolted awake.

He lunged across the bed and pried my jaw open, fingers digging deep.

"Spit it out — Ava, spit it out right now!"

The pills came up in a mess of saliva. He held me so tight I couldn't breathe, his tears hitting the back of my hand one after another.

"Don't leave me. Please."

I said nothing. My eyes dropped to his neck.

There was a mark there — vivid, unmistakable.

He followed my gaze and went pale. His hand flew up to cover it, yanking his collar higher.

By morning, I stood in front of the mirror.

The person looking back at me was hollowed out — skin and bone, dull eyes, hair tangled like weeds.

For over six months I'd been folded into the dark corners of this apartment, not living so much as enduring.

Outside the door, reporters waited with their cameras like hunters at a blind.

"Stella was young and brilliant. You're weak and pathetic — can't even have children. What else do you have besides jealousy?"

"You drove a rising star to her death with your dirty tricks. You're a monster."

"Professor Harmon must have the worst luck alive, ending up with someone like you."

Even taking out the trash earned me eggs and gravel from god knows where, hurled with gleeful hatred.

Only Liam never wavered.

He fed me my medication without complaint. He taught himself to cook, badly at first. He held my hand through every nightmare, all night long.

I had believed he was my salvation. My cure.

Now the cold words from Stella's letter crashed back into me.

[Don't blame Liam, Ava. He's been suffering too — I'm the only one who brings him any comfort.]

[Just hold on a little longer. Once the dust settles, I'll tell everyone the truth. That you never pushed me.]

I put on a mask and a cap and quietly followed Liam to a hidden apartment on the outskirts of Chicago.

The sunlight hit my eyes like a slap — I'd forgotten what it felt like.

The door eased open. He slipped inside with the easy familiarity of someone returning home, his face soft in a way I hadn't seen in months.

But I still saw her.

Stella Knox, holding a baby almost a year old, laughing like she owned the world.

Everything in the letter was true.

My legs nearly gave out. I pressed my palm flat against the wall, my other hand balling into a fist.

Before I turned eighteen, my body was whole.

Then I went looking for Liam — he'd been taken. I found him, but a rusted blade caught me across the lower abdomen during the struggle.

We had no money. All we could afford was the cheapest antibiotics from a back-alley clinic.

I crouched on that filthy bathroom floor and tried to hold myself together while everything fell apart inside me.

By the time a real doctor found me, I was already delirious with pain.

When I came to, I was told the damage was permanent. My uterus — destroyed beyond repair. I would never carry a child.

Liam held me and wept until he couldn't speak.

"It's my fault. I'm so sorry, Ava. I will fix this. I swear I will fix this."

He meant it. He went into medicine because of me, pushed himself until he became the youngest professor his department had ever seen.

He swore he would find a way.

But then, at the top of his field, he met Stella — another prodigy in medicine.

He told me he was away at a conference. He was gone for ten months. And when he came back, she had his child.

He had let me rot under the weight of a lie while building a life with someone else.

A laugh tore out of me — low, broken, unhinged.

My whole body shook with it. Tears and snot streaked down my face.

I must have looked insane.

It was dark by the time I turned and walked home. Liam still hadn't come out.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand and went straight to his study.

I found the experimental vials in the back of the cabinet.

For nearly a decade, Liam had claimed he was researching a therapy to restore my reproductive system.

Every trial had failed. Every subject who took it died of cardiac arrest.

I uncapped one without hesitating and swallowed it.