Chapter 1

The next morning, I had barely stepped into the office when content director dropped a TikTok link into the company group chat.

The caption read: WHEN YOUR CEO GIVES HIS ASSISTANT A PRIVATE GOLF LESSON.

Overnight, it had racked up more than a million views.

The marketing team had decided to capitalize on the attention. They approved a new social media series featuring Ethan and Chloe, called The Aster Edit.

And I was assigned to edit it.

A friend of Chloe’s sent me a folder of clips they’d recorded over the past six months. One showed Ethan taking off his scarf and wrapping it around Chloe’s neck.

I checked the date. It was my birthday.

I had cooked dinner and waited for him from seven until midnight, when he finally texted me.

A client isn’t feeling well. I’m taking her home. Don’t wait up.

I believed him.

I even left the soup warming on the stove in case he came home hungry.

So there had never been a sick client who needed his personal attention. There had only been Chloe.

A coworker leaned over my shoulder.

“You have to keep this shot. Look at the way he’s looking at her.”

I watched the clip again.

Ethan’s fingers brushed Chloe’s hair away before he tied the scarf. She looked up at him and smiled.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s a good shot.”

That afternoon, I submitted the first cut for review.

The content director asked me to slow down the moment Ethan wrapped his scarf around Chloe’s neck by half a second.

I did exactly as she asked and added a soft-focus filter.

At nine that night, Ethan came home while I was still working on the subtitles.

I didn’t know how long Ethan had been standing behind me.

He watched the video from beginning to end.

“Lena.”

“Hmm?”

“Looks like the last few months have finally trained that temper out of you.”

I ignored him.

He leaned over and pinned my hand on the mouse beneath his. His breath warmed my ear.

“You used to cry all night if you saw me talking to Chloe for more than a few minutes.”

“And now you can even edit the scarf scene to look this sweet. You really don’t mind anymore?”

His dark eyes held mine. “What? Don’t love me anymore?”

My hand paused.

Once, I would have rushed to prove him wrong.

Now I simply nudged the mouse, freeing my hand from his.

“The edit is due tonight. Don’t start.”

He froze. Those were the same words he used to say to me almost every day. Now the tables had turned.

Ethan watched me for a few seconds, then suddenly pressed his hand to my forehead.

“Why are you so pale?”

He picked up the iced coffee on my desk and took it away.

“Your stomach only just got better. Stop doing this to yourself.”

He went into the kitchen to heat some water, then found the stomach medication I kept in the entryway drawer.

He remembered the dosage.

He remembered which pills had to be taken before meals and which ones came after.

He was as attentive as he had been three years ago, when I suffered my first stomach attack.

That night, he carried me down two flights of stairs. He had been in such a hurry that he put his shoes on the wrong feet.

It was a sweet memory.

Sweet enough that I had lived on it for years, using it again and again to survive all the pain he gave me afterward.

Ethan had just placed the pills in my hand when his phone rang.

Chloe had a fever.

He listened for a moment before saying, “Don’t take ibuprofen. It gives you hives.”

“Have the pharmacy downstairs send up some acetaminophen.”

Then he hung up and left.

I stared at the pills in my palm for a long time before swallowing them one by one.

A smile touched my lips. I had almost forgotten. Ethan could be just as thoughtful with Chloe.

It hadn’t started this way.

When Ethan and I first met, I had just joined Aster as a content editor.

At a corporate gala, I was filming the event when I caught a woman drugging Ethan’s champagne. I got him out through a service exit and stayed with him at the hospital until he recovered.

After that night, Ethan started checking in on me.

Coffee after work turned into dinner, and dinner turned into long conversations in his car outside my apartment. Then, one day, he told me he loved me.

By then, I had already fallen for him too.

We agreed to keep our relationship secret at first.

“If people find out about us now, they’ll assume I handed you everything you worked for,” he told me. “I don’t want them taking your achievements away from you.”

Back then, it sounded like protection.

And even in secret, Ethan treated me in a way that I never doubted his love.

He kept my stomach medication in both his desk and his car. On my twenty-eighth birthday, he tracked down a first edition of my favorite novel. And every Saturday morning, he woke me with breakfast in bed.

He never used his position to advance my career, but before every major presentation, he stayed up with me, listening as I rehearsed until I could deliver every line without stumbling.

One year into our relationship, he proposed. He promised we would announce our engagement when the time was right.

I kept believing that day would come, even after Chloe became his executive assistant six months ago. Then one rainy afternoon, someone filmed Ethan holding an umbrella over her outside the office.

The video went viral.

Thousands of people began shipping them. Fan accounts appeared overnight, and every new clip of Ethan and Chloe sent more people to Aster’s website.

Ethan asked me to put up with it. “It’s just content, Lena,” he said. “The attention is good for the company. You know how this works.”

I almost laughed at the irony. Three years ago, the footage I captured had brought Ethan and me together. Three years later, I was editing footage that sold him and Chloe as a couple.

But it didn’t matter anymore.

I took a deep breath and opened the job offer I had already accepted from a company across the country.

In three days, I would leave him.