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My husband handed me divorce papers on our third wedding anniversary—while his mistress sat on our kitchen counter, wearing my dead mother's ring. I stood in the doorway, still holding the positive pregnancy test in my coat pocket. Two pink lines. I'd found out an hour ago. I'd driven home shaking, rehearsing how I'd tell him. Damian, we're going to be parents. Instead, I got a manila folder shoved into my chest. "Sign them," Damian said. His voice was the temperature of a morgue. "My lawyer already filled everything out. You keep the car. Nothing else." Willow Vance swung her legs off my counter and smiled at me the way a cat smiles at a bird with a broken wing. My mother's sapphire ring glittered on her finger—the ring I kept in my jewelry box upstairs. The only thing I had left of the woman who raised me. "That's mine," I said quietly. "Damian gave it to me." Willow held her hand up to the light, admiring it. "He said you wouldn't mind. It's not like you'll need heirlooms where you're going." I looked at my husband. Three years ago, this man had kissed my knuckles at the altar and promised me forever. Now he couldn't even look at me. "You gave her my mother's ring." "You gave my sister a coma," he said. "Consider it interest." There it was. The wound that had been rotting between us for two years. The night Elena fell down the marble staircase at the Cross estate. The night one witness—Willow—swore she saw me push her. I never pushed her. I told him a hundred times. A hundred times, he chose to believe the woman currently wearing my mother's ring. "I didn't touch Elena." My voice didn't shake. I was proud of that. "Sign the papers, Aria." He finally looked at me, and I wished he hadn't. There was nothing left in his eyes. Not anger. Not grief. Just a stranger who happened to know what I looked like when I cried. "You have until midnight to get out of my house." My house. I'd picked out every curtain in this place. I'd planted the roses he never noticed. I'd spent two years loving a man who slept with his back to me, hoping that if I stayed soft enough, patient enough, good enough, he'd remember he loved me first. The pregnancy test burned in my pocket like a live coal. Tell him, some pathetic part of me whispered. Tell him and he'll stop. He'll remember. Then Willow slid off the counter, walked over, and looped her arms around my husband's neck. He didn't push her away. He let her kiss his jaw while his eyes stayed on me, flat and waiting, like I was a contract he needed executed. And I understood, with perfect, surgical clarity: if I told him about the baby right now, he'd think it was a trap. A desperate woman's last hook. He'd sneer. Willow would laugh. And my child would grow up knowing its first introduction to its father was met with disgust. No. I took the pen off the counter. My hand was steady. I signed Aria Blake Cross for the last time, then drew a line through Cross so hard the paper tore. "Done," I said. "Congratulations. You're free." Something flickered across Damian's face—surprise, maybe, that I hadn't cried, hadn't begged, hadn't performed the breakdown they'd both bought tickets to. Willow's smile slipped half an inch. "That's it?" she demanded. "No tears? No scene?" I picked up my coat and looked at her mother's-ring hand one last time. "Keep it," I said. "Everything he gives you used to be mine. You'll want to get comfortable with that." I walked out of the house I decorated, past the roses I planted, into the rain. I made it exactly three blocks before I pulled over, pressed my forehead to the steering wheel, and let myself shatter—one hand over my mouth, the other over my stomach. I'm sorry, baby. It's just us now. That's when my phone rang. Unknown number. I almost didn't answer. "Ms. Blake?" A crisp, unfamiliar voice. "My name is Harold Finch. I'm the executor of the Sinclair estate. I've been looking for you for eleven days." My blood went cold. Nobody was supposed to know that name still had anything to do with me. "Your grandfather is dying," the man said. "And his last request is to see the granddaughter who threw away his empire."