Chapter 2

Victor didn't come home that night.

I sat in the living room until the early hours of the morning, when an email from Stella arrived.

"Ma'am, here is the information you requested. Mia Rosen, 22, third-year med student at Columbia. I also found her private social media account. There isn't much, but I think you need to see it."

I opened the attachment.

Mia's account had only three posts, but each one was a blade twisting in my gut.

The first was posted three years ago. June 15th.

The night before our wedding.

The photo showed Mia covered in hickies, lying lazily in a man's arms.

The man's face was cropped out, but I knew those hands. Long fingers, with Victor's family signet ring on his pinky.

The caption: "Wearing her wedding dress, sleeping with her man. Tomorrow is her big day, but tonight he's mine."

My hands started to shake.

The second post: eight months ago. September 3rd.

The night I had a miscarriage.

I was in the hospital all night. Victor said he had an urgent meeting and would be there as soon as he could.

The photo was of an ultrasound report.

The caption: "My man is going to be a daddy. While she lost hers, I'm giving him what she couldn't."

The room started to spin.

I ran to the bathroom and threw up everything I'd eaten.

But I forced myself to go back and read the last one.

The third post was from two months ago, on our wedding anniversary.

The background was the nursery I had designed myself—the pale yellow walls, the white crib, the tiny clothes I'd spent a month picking out.

After I lost the baby, I couldn't bear to go in there again. I just had the maids keep it clean.

But in the photo, the crib was a mess of tangled sheets.

The caption: "The old hag is asleep. He says doing it in here is the biggest thrill. Said the thrill of defiling her dreams makes him harder."

My world tilted on its axis.

That night, Victor had come home and held me, telling me, "Don't be sad about the baby, my love. You're the best wife in the world. We'll have another."

And just hours before, he'd been in that same room, with her.

I lost it. I smashed everything in the living room that reminded me of him: our wedding photos, the vases he'd bought me, every piece of art we'd chosen together.

The moonlight glinted off the shattered glass.

Then I ran upstairs and threw every one of Victor's suits into the fireplace.

Watching the flames devour his expensive suits, I felt nothing. Just a hollowed-out cold.

Finally, I remembered the wedding ring. The one Victor had designed for me.

I never wore it, afraid I'd lose it, so I kept it in his safe.

The combination was our wedding anniversary.

How fucking ironic.

I took out the ring. As I was closing the safe, I saw a folder tucked in the corner.

On pure instinct, I opened it.

Inside was a draft of Mia's graduate thesis.

The rage that filled me was white-hot. The core theories, the experimental design, even the methods of data analysis—they were all identical to the research I was about to publish in The Lancet.

My research. The work that had cost me three years of sleepless nights.

The floor fell out from under me.

Victor wasn't just destroying my marriage. He was trying to destroy my life's work and gift it to his whore.

I grabbed my laptop and altered the core data in my own research files.

Then I picked up the phone and dialed the private number for the Dean of Columbia Medical School.

"About your offer to have me as a guest panelist for the thesis defense presentations… I accept."

The Dean was ecstatic.

I hung up and stared out at the cold, dark city.

It was time to give Victor and Mia a gift they would never forget.