Chapter 1

When I got home, ready to have it out with Gwen, I found the house decked out for Quintin's baby shower.

In the living room, all the photos of Gwen and me from the past ten years, along with our pre-wedding pictures, had been torn down. In their place were family portraits of Gwen, Keith, and Quintin—chronicling from pregnancy, labor, and delivery, right through to Quintin turning one month old.

In the bottom right corner of every photo, Gwen had carefully handwritten the date with a pen and for eleven months, not a single day had been missed. The photos were plastered all over the house, so dense they completely covered the walls.

That was when it all clicked. During the year I was abroad for further studies, I'd deliberately worked around the time difference to call her when she should have been free. But she always turned down my video calls, claiming she was busy.

I had naively thought her workload was piling up, and I even felt guilty for putting her through so much. It never crossed my mind that she was actually busy becoming someone else's wife.

Inside the house, everyone was fussing over Quintin.

"Quintin is so delicate and handsome. His eyes look exactly like Keith's—he's going to be a heartthrob when he grows up!"

"Yeah, lucky for Quintin, his dad is someone like Keith—you know, good stock. Not like those short-lived folks in Ernest's family. Ernest spends all day holed up in Gwen's company lab, yet I don't see him bringing home any real money."

Everyone there was from Gwen's side of the family, so it went without saying that no one was going to speak up for me. After all, Gwen was now a successful, well-known CEO, and her relatives were all busy sucking up to her. Even though they all knew I existed, they treated me as nothing more than a punchline to laugh about over dinner.

I was just about to step inside when Keith spotted me. Cradling Quintin in his arms, he smiled with undisguised smugness. "Ernest, you're back! Why didn't you say anything? Come in and have a seat."

Keith ushered me into the house, acting as if he were the master of the home. Only then did Gwen's family notice me.

The moment Gwen's father, Bobby Blanchard, saw I'd come empty-handed, his expression darkened considerably.

"You really have no sense at all. Today is Quintin's debut. Even Keith knew to buy thousands of dollars' worth of supplements and toys for him, yet you show up empty-handed?

"You're not only bad at making money, but you've got zero emotional intelligence too. I must've been blind to ever agree to you and Gwen being together."

But all I felt was bitter irony.

When Gwen first brought me home to meet her parents, they had sympathized with me for being an orphan. They had taken my hands and told me that from then on, this would be my home.

Even when they found out I worked in a lab and only made five thousand dollars a month, Mr. Blanchard hadn't looked down on me.

Instead, he had kept pouring me drinks, saying that in his generation, the people they respected the most were scientists. It didn't matter how much I earned—as long as my work benefited humanity, I was bringing honor to the family name.

That was until three years ago, when Gwen's company was on the verge of bankruptcy because their products couldn't compete. I took a huge risk, breaching my contract to use my latest research findings to pull Gwen's company back from the brink.

I even helped them secure tens of millions of dollars in funding from an industry giant in one fell swoop.

The price I paid? I was blacklisted and completely shut out of the industry for violating my confidentiality agreement. No other company would hire me, leaving me with no choice but to stay on as a researcher at Gwen's company.

At first, Mr. and Mrs. Blanchard were effusively grateful, saying the company wouldn't be where it was today without me.

But as the business grew bigger and stronger, they gradually came to see me only as a burden—someone who survived solely because they were charitable enough to give me a job and keep me fed.