All Chapters of The Billionaire’s Plus-Size Ex-Wife: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The Anniversary That Changed EverythingAva’s POVI woke up smiling before I even opened my eyes.Today was my first wedding anniversary with Lucas Sterling.For most people, that sentence alone would sound like a dream, married to one of the most powerful men in the city, living in a house bigger than the apartment building I grew up in. But my marriage hadn’t started with romance. It started with his grandmother’s insistence and my quiet, foolish hope that love could grow where none had been planted.I still believed it could.I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, letting myself imagine tonight going differently than every other night in the past year. Maybe Lucas would smile at me the way he smiled at his business partners when a deal went well. Maybe he’d finally look at me like a wife instead of an arrangement he was still getting used to.One year. Three hundred and sixty-five days of trying.He had never been unkind to me. Not once. He never raised his voice, never

Leaving Without Looking BackAva’s POVI didn’t cry while I packed. I think I’d used up whatever tears I had left on the stairs, in that one dizzy moment when the world tilted sideways and I nearly lost the only proof I had left that any of this mattered.I moved through the bedroom slowly, pulling open drawers I’d once arranged with so much hope, back when I still believed this house was going to become a home instead of a waiting room. I didn’t take much. A year of marriage had filled these closets with expensive things, dresses Lucas’s assistant had picked out for events, jewelry that came in boxes heavier than the gifts themselves and none of it belonged to me in any way that mattered. I left it all hanging exactly where it was.What I did take fit into a single suitcase.A framed photograph of my parents, taken the summer before my mother got sick, both of them laughing at something just out of frame. My father’s old wristwatch, stopped at some hour I’d never bothered to fix bec

Five Years LaterAva’s POVFive years is long enough to build an entirely different life out of the ashes of an old one. I know, because I did it.I don’t think about that night as often as I used to. The candles, the roses, the envelope on the table, for years those memories used to ambush me at the strangest moments, in elevators, in the middle of meetings, in the quiet seconds before falling asleep. Now they mostly stay where I’ve put them: in the past, filed away, useful only as a reminder of how far I’ve come.My grandfather’s company had been a modest textile manufacturer when Richard Bennett first handed me the paperwork in his downtown office, my hands still trembling from a night I hadn’t finished processing yet. It wasn’t glamorous. It wasn’t even particularly profitable. But it was mine, entirely and completely mine, and something about that ownership lit a fire in me I hadn’t known I had.I threw myself into it the way only someone with nothing left to lose can. I worked e