Ex Daddy
On their third wedding anniversary, Elena Riva cooked, lit the candles, and waited. The text arrived at midnight, from a number she didn't know: a photo of her husband, Matteo Sartori, fashion's newest billionaire, his arms around a woman younger and prettier.
Five years of devotion. Night shifts at eighteen so he could chase his dream, married at twenty in a secondhand dress. In return, a husband who looked at her like a bill he was tired of paying.
He came home the next evening with the other woman on his arm, and it was Chiara who slid the divorce papers across the table. "Sign. It's cleaner this way."
Elena signed, then drank herself blind and woke alone in a hotel suite: ten bundles of cash, an unnamed business card, no memory of the night. Only a phone number.
Two years later, broke, her mother dying for a surgery she can't afford and a child growing under her heart, Elena calls the number. The man who answers is Dante Moretti, her ex-husband's estranged uncle, a name that makes grown men in Milan check the exits. He offers a contract marriage: her mother's surgery, his name for her baby, all bills paid.
The gunfire at her own wedding corrects her idea of what she married.
Then Elena builds her own fashion house, and it doesn't compete with Sartori. It wins. At the partnership meeting, the woman heading the table smiles with his ex-wife's eyes.
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