Chapter 3

Thea's POV

After we got home, I took a shower and crawled into bed, but I couldn't sleep. I figured I would head to the study and find a book to read, and that was when I stumbled across an old diary of mine.

The cover was worn and faded, which made sense. I had written it back in seventh grade. But I still remembered everything inside. It was all about Ryland and me.

"September 1st, 2012. Sunny.

"I'm so happy. Ryland and I went to register at our new school together today. We were wearing the same uniform, walking through the gates side by side, and everything just felt right.

"He even carried my boxes, and I wiped the sweat off his face. I wanted to lean in and whisper that I liked him."

Every entry in that diary captured a moment between us, and every single one of them had felt like something beautiful. But when Ryland found the diary, his reaction was nothing I could have prepared for. That moment was seared into my memory.

It was the second year of our marriage, and things between us had seemed to thaw a little. He wasn't as cold toward me anymore. Every now and then he would actually talk to me, and when I was in the study, he no longer turned around and walked out.

Then one day, he found the diary. The moment he read what was inside, his face went dark.

"Thea, so you've been scheming this whole time. You planned all of this from the start. You genuinely disgust me."

He threw the diary at my feet and stormed out.

The pain hit me right in the chest, and tears burned at the edges of my eyes. That diary was something I had written when I was a naive kid, full of nothing but innocent feelings for him.

How could that possibly make him uncomfortable? How did that make me a schemer?

Our relationship hit rock bottom all over again.

It wasn't until much later that I found out the truth. The reason things kept getting worse between us was that Payton had been stirring the pot the entire time, ruining Ryland's image of me from the inside.

I had tried to explain things to him, but he never gave me the chance. He wouldn't even come home to sleep.

I stopped having any illusions about our marriage. Ending it felt like the only real option left.

But just as I had everything ready for the divorce, Ryland's family business ran into serious trouble. I still couldn't let go of him, and I couldn't bring myself to watch him face a crisis alone.

So I quietly hid all the divorce paperwork and borrowed a significant amount of money from my family to help pull his company through. Once the business was back on its feet, I finally let myself breathe.

I thought that surviving something like that together might soften things between us. But the opposite happened. He seemed to resent me even more than before, stopped coming home entirely, and wouldn't so much as look at me.

This wasn't the marriage I wanted, but I had no choice except to accept it. I had always believed that marrying the man I loved meant we would grow old together, happy for the rest of our lives. Instead, we became strangers held together by a piece of paper, bound to each other with nothing left between us.

The love and partnership I had dreamed of turned into nothing more than a business arrangement between two families. I stopped trying to hold our marriage together and just let it drift.

Then one day, Payton sent me a photo. In it, Ryland was wiping a smudge from the corner of her mouth. A lavish spread of food covered the table in front of them, and despite how large the table was, the two of them were sitting pressed right up against each other.

The love of his life was back, and seeing how happy they looked together, it hit me all at once that letting go might be the best thing I could do. Setting them free would set me free too.