ログインMy husband came home on our anniversary with my best friend on his arm and divorce papers in his hand. He told the world I cheated. He took my name, and left me sleeping on the. streets with a secret I hadn't told anyone — his baby growing inside me. I had nothing. Until a great-aunt I barely knew left me a vineyard, an estate, and a second chance I didn't ask for. I was finally building something. A business. A life. A future for my child. What I didn't know was that I was surrounded by more enemies. The new man I was falling for had been sent to find me. And the man who divorced me was now fighting to get me back — because I had become the one thing he couldn't beat.
もっと見るI was not listening. I knew I wasn't listening, and I suspected Agatha knew it too, but she was a patient woman and the salmon in front of me was the single greatest thing that had happened to me in six weeks, so we had reached a silent understanding. She talked. While I ate. The restaurant was the kind of place that had no prices on the menu, Agatha had walked me through the doors in my dirty clothes without a word, ordered half the menu without consulting me, and watched with careful, unreadable eyes as I ravished my plate like a woman who had been on the wrong side of an empty refrigerator for longer than she intended to admit. "So let me make sure I understand you," I said, tearing off another piece of bread because the bread was also exceptional and I had stopped being embarrassed about it somewhere around my third roll. I looked up at her. "Aunt Maggie left me a large estate and a vineyard." "That's correct." "My great-aunt Maggie." I said it again slowly. "Who I hav
The first thing I saw was white. White ceiling. White walls. White coat. I stared at the man leaning over me and said the only thing that made sense. "God?" My voice came out like something that had been run over. "Am I dead? Is this heaven?" The man laughed softly, and shook his head. "Hospital. You were brought in last night." I lay there for a moment absorbing that information. Not heaven. Hospital. Somehow both disappointing and a relief at the same time. He helped me sit up, a young doctor with calm hands and the unbothered energy of someone who had seen far worse than me on a Tuesday night. He checked my blood pressure, shone a light in my eyes, asked me to follow his finger. I followed his finger and tried to remember last night. The bar. The women. The television screen with Tyler's hand on Lucy's waist. The door with the blind pulled down. Walking backwards in the dark— My hand flew to my stomach before the thought even finished. The doctor saw it. He stopped what he
"Refill." The bartender didn't turn around. He was wiping down the counter at the other end of the bar, ginger beard, arms like a man who had never lost an argument in his life, moving with the unhurried energy of someone who had heard everything and was impressed by none of it. "Hey." I knocked my empty bottle against the counter. "I said refill." He turned. Looked at the bottle. Looked at the four others lined up beside it. Looked at me with the specific expression of a man doing arithmetic he didn't like the answer to. "No," he said. "Excuse me?" "You've got five bottles sitting there you haven't paid for. Plus three from last night." He set down his cloth. "I'm not running a charity." "I'm going to pay." I sat up as straight as the bar stool allowed, which wasn't very. "I just need a small extension." "How small?" I opened my mouth. Closed it. He pointed at the door. "I'm not ready to leave." "You're not ready, but you're going," he said, and turned back to
The cashier's name tag said PRIYA. I remember staring at it while she ran my card the first time, the way you fixed your eyes on something small and manageable when the rest of the world was threatening to come apart. The store was too bright. It was always too bright in places like this, the kind of fluorescent lighting that left nowhere to hide. The machine beeped. Priya looked at the screen the way people looked at things they didn't want to have to say out loud. "It's declined." "I'm sorry?" "Your card." She turned the reader toward me. "Declined." The woman behind me in the queue shifted her weight. I heard it. I heard everything. The squeak of a cart wheel, a child asking his mother something, and the low hum of the refrigerators along the back wall, because my brain had gone very quiet in the way it did right before something bad arrived. "Try it again," I said. She tried it again. Same beep. Same flat, indifferent sound. "I have another one." I was already digging th
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