Chapter 2

The slap never landed. I raised my hand and caught Mary by the wrist with perfect timing. Her skin was rough, but she wasn't strong. I only tightened my grip a little, and she was already baring her teeth in pain.

"Let go! Let go of me!"

"Call the police." I ignored her shrieking and said it to the stunned neighbor beside us. Mrs. Carter snapped out of it and fumbled for her phone.

Mary panicked. "You wouldn't dare! Your husband is dead, and you still want to blow this up? Have you no shame?"

"Why wouldn't I?" I tilted my head and looked at her. "I'd love for this to blow up even bigger. Let everyone see exactly how the White family raised its daughter—into a woman who broke up someone else's marriage and got another woman's husband killed. Let everyone judge for themselves. I'm the victim here, yet your whole family came to my door to curse me out and hit me. So who's really the shameless one?"

The second I finished speaking, sirens wailed closer and closer. The police arrived fast. Mary and her relatives wilted on the spot like roosters that had lost the fight. As the police took them away for statements, Mary kept twisting around to glare at me, her eyes full of hate. I shut the door expressionlessly and cut off all the noise outside. The world finally went quiet.

I made myself a cup of hot tea, sat on the couch, and opened the files my lawyer had sent over. They covered the prenup David and I had signed, along with a full breakdown of every asset we'd accumulated over the past five years. When we got married, David had nothing. My parents paid the down payment on this house. The money to start the company came from my own savings too. Every dollar the company made after that, he insisted had to be reinvested.

And I believed him. I wore discount clothes, used the most basic skincare, and gave the best of everything to him and to this family. And what did I get in return? He took the money I'd saved by pinching pennies and used it to buy Vanessa designer bags and take her around the world.

My phone buzzed. It was my mom. "Em, are you okay? I heard from the neighbors. Did the White family come after you?"

"I'm fine."

"How could you do something like this?" My mom's voice was thick with tears. "The dead deserve respect. How could you refuse to let them recover him? No matter what David did, he was still your husband. If this gets out, what will people think of you? Of our family?"

Same old line. It was always reputation, appearances, what other people might say. From the day I decided to marry David, they thought I had embarrassed them. Now that David was gone, they thought I had denied him a proper end.

"Mom." I cut her off. "I was married to David for five years. I put about 170,000 dollars into his company, gave another 67,000 dollars to his family, and chipped in about 33,000 dollars to help his sister buy a place. In those five years, I never bought a single piece of clothing that cost more than 170 dollars. He took my money and bought his mistress 17,000 dollars bags and 1,700-dollar-a-night hotel rooms. And when he jumped into the sea to save someone, the person on his mind wasn't me. So tell me-when did he ever treat me like his wife?"

There was silence on the other end. I pulled a thick stack of receipts from the drawer. "Every cent I've spent on this family over the years is documented. The total comes to about 280,000 dollars. And I'm getting every last cent of it back. As for what other people think..." I paused, then said it word by word. "From the moment he betrayed me, that stopped being my problem. My heart turned harder than stone a long time ago, worn down by one disappointment after another."

After I hung up, I felt lighter all over. The chains that had weighed me down for years—family, love, public judgment, morality—all of it shattered under my own hands in that moment. Warm sunlight streamed in through the window.

My phone rang again. This time it was my lawyer, Alex Carter. "Ms. Grant, everything has been processed. All assets under David Reed's name, including the house, his shares, his savings, and an accident insurance policy worth about 1.7 million dollars, will be transferred into your name within three business days. Also, Mary White was brought in by the police. She admitted to causing a disturbance, and by procedure she'll be held for three days."

"Excellent."

I leaned back on the couch and looked up at the ceiling. A 1.7 million dollars policy. I was the one who pushed him to buy it in the first place, and I was the beneficiary. He'd hated the idea back then, saying I was cursing him to death. Turns out my words came true.

Only then did I finally let out a low laugh. But as I laughed, tears started running down my face. They were for the love I'd buried, for the five foolish years I had wasted, and even more for the fact that I had finally begun again.

Alex stayed quiet on the other end, listening without interrupting. Only after I had calmed down did he speak again. "Ms. Grant, there's one more thing. David Reed's parents have already bought tickets on this afternoon's train. They're on their way from home."