Chapter 1

By the fifth year of my marriage to Dylan Grant, he had once again elected to spend Valentine's Day with his childhood sweetheart, Rebecca Lane.

That year, Rebecca's social media feeds had been relentless, three hundred and sixty-five updates in total, a meticulous chronicle that stretched from sunrise on a windswept beach to the hushed corridors of a late-night hotel.

Friends and acquaintances offered the same weary consolation. "Valentine's Day is for lovers, sweetheart. Better to just let it go."

But this time, there were no tears, no dramatic outbursts, and I certainly didn't waste the evening chasing his location history across the city.

Instead, I simply had the locks changed.

*****

The moment I hit "Send," my phone lit up with Dylan's name.

His voice came through tight with irritation. "You know I'd never actually cross a line. Don't start. I'll be home by two. Letting her post nonstop is just my way of proving to the world that we're too busy for anything to happen."

I said nothing in return and closed the phone, too drained to bother sending him the new door code.

But that silence must have gotten under his skin, because it wasn't long before he was standing in the doorway with a locksmith in tow, still wearing the wrong pair of slippers without even noticing.

I reached out and handed him the divorce papers.

He barely glanced at them, his expression hardening into a cold sneer as if I were just putting on another familiar performance. "Really? Divorcing me over something this petty again?"

My eyes drifted down to the mismatched slippers on his feet before I looked back up and met his gaze with a smile that matched his own.

"Yes," I said quietly. "This petty. I want a divorce."

A sharp, dismissive laugh cut through the room, and the smell of alcohol hit me before he even moved.

"What's the matter? Decided to skip the tantrum this year and go straight for the paperwork?" He planted a palm against the wall and leaned in, ready to close the distance between us, but I shifted sideways just in time.

The divorce papers slipped from my hand and fanned out across the floor in a messy scatter.

He let out a cold, brittle laugh. "I came home two hours early. Not so I could watch you put on a show. Pick those up and tear them up. Go to bed. I'm the one who can handle staying up late, but you can't."

The words carried the cadence of concern, but I'd been married to him long enough to hear the irritation coiled beneath them.

After all, every time I'd brought up divorce before, it had been nothing but noise. I'd never actually gone so far as to hand him the papers.

Five years of marriage, and I'd made a ritual out of falling apart every Valentine's Day.

The first year, his childhood sweetheart Rebecca posted seven carefully framed photos, each one tagged with a location like breadcrumbs laid out for me to follow.

And follow them I did, tracing her steps from one spot to the next until I finally gave up and went home alone, where I sat watching the clock tick past two in the morning until the front door opened.

Dylan swore up and down, "The wedding's hit Rebecca hard. I'm just worried she's going to do something stupid. I'll talk to her and make it crystal clear that she needs to leave us alone for good."

For the next month, he smoothed everything over with money, and I let myself be convinced.

Then the second Valentine's Day came, and he disappeared again, only this time Rebecca's feed held thirty separate posts.

Working backward through the clues they'd left, I finally tracked them down.

That was when I took a blade to my wrist. Dylan's parents arrived just in time and managed to talk me down.

They threw money at the problem for six months and made Dylan sign a written promise before I finally quieted down.

I thought that was the end of it. But then came the third year. Rebecca's feed jumped to a hundred and eighty posts.

They showed her and Dylan revisiting the breakfast stall from their old elementary school, poking around the stationery shop from their middle school days, and even retracing the steps of my own wedding venue.

I'd lost count of the posts by now. I was not even angry anymore, just hollowed out, and too tired to care.

By the fourth year, I had reached my breaking point, so I stormed straight into Dylan's private bar without bothering to announce myself.

Once inside, I couldn't help overhearing his friends joking around. "Think your wife is going to show up and ruin things for us today? Honestly, we're all terrified at this point."

"Come on. She doesn't get it. Valentine's Day is for your lover, not your wife."

Through the glass window, my eyes frantically searched for Dylan.

There he was, legs crossed, a faint, amused smile playing on his lips. "Don't even mention her. She's such a headache."