Chapter 1

In the sixth year of our long-distance relationship, I told my boyfriend I was too busy with work to spend his birthday with him.

In secret, I boarded a ten-hour flight to Harborwick with the deed to the condo I'd bought.

I was going to propose in front of all our friends and surprise him.

While I waited for a car, I answered a few work messages and scrolled through social media.

The first thing I saw was a post from my best friend.

"I'm a godmother! Nine-pound baby girl. I'm so happy."

I opened the photo and found my boyfriend, Lucas Wynn, standing beside another woman with a newborn between them.

My mind went completely blank.

I kept scrolling back through her older posts and found their entire life documented there.

Meeting, dating, marriage, pregnancy, birth-six years of it, without a single gap.

Several of my closest friends were smiling in their wedding photo.

Something cold went through me, because now I understood. All of them had known.

Only me. I'd been lied to for six straight years.

Chapter 1

Once I found out which hospital my best friend was at, I went straight there without stopping.

The second I pushed the door open, Lucas Wynn was bending down to kiss the woman in the bed, his whole face soft with it.

Gifts for the newborn were stacked everywhere around them.

The whole perfect picture cracked apart the moment I walked in.

There were so many of our mutual friends in that room, including my best friend and several of the people I'd trusted most in the world.

A hush went through the room, and I heard someone catch their breath.

The woman in the bed looked at me, puzzled. "Who are you?"

I opened my mouth, and then I caught Lucas's warning look.

"Just an old classmate. Haven't seen her in years."

I almost laughed.

Ten years together, and Lucas didn't dare admit who I was.

My best friend, Hannah Pike, took my hand and pulled me toward the hall.

"Iris, don't upset Celeste while she's recovering. Whatever this is, we can deal with it another day."

I stared at that familiar face and thought about more than a decade of video calls and late-night conversations.

She'd watched me sleep four hours a night to save for a home. She'd listened to me plan a future out loud.

And she never once told me that future didn't exist.

She hauled me out of that room, and the first thing out of her mouth was a warning.

"Celeste just had a baby. Don't go in there and make a scene."

I asked her one question. "How long has this been going on? Why didn't you tell me?"

She was quiet for a moment. "They've been together six years. All of us knew. We didn't tell you because we were afraid you'd blow up."

It hurt so much I could barely get air in.

Lucas and I had been together ten years. Six of them in different cities.

I'd brought up getting married more times than I could count, and he always blamed the distance or said it wasn't the right time yet.

He told me once that he wasn't marrying me until we owned a place.

That was why I worked myself raw, stayed up building my career, saved every dollar I could get my hands on.

For six years Lucas said he was too busy to come see me in Rosebridge.

I took leave over and over and flew back to Harborwick, and every time he said work was crushing him and gave me a rushed hour before he left.

I never once questioned it. I thought he was just exhausted.

Turns out he'd saved all his patience and all his tenderness for somebody else.

Hannah saw the property deed in my hand, and her expression shifted. Then she seemed to decide there was no point pretending anymore.

"So what if you had ten years? Lucas has always wanted Celeste. Why do you think a company president spent all that time playing broke around you?

"You were killing yourself at work while he was off traveling with her. Money goes where love goes, Iris. Wake up."

She pulled out her phone and showed me the proof.

Lucas and Celeste kissing under northern lights. Holding hands on a dune. Leaning into each other on a snowfield.

Every photo had a date on it. The earliest was March, six years ago.

That was the worst stretch of my life. My job status was still up in the air, my mother was seriously ill, and I couldn't breathe under the weight of it.

Every time I called Lucas back then, he somehow never picked up.

He'd already been with her.

My phone buzzed. A message from him.

"Go back to your hotel. I'll explain later."

I pulled my hand out of Hannah's and shoved the door open again.

Chapter 2

Lucas's brow creased the moment he saw me. "Iris, what the hell are you doing?"

I took out the card I'd brought and set it gently beside the baby's pile of gifts.

"We were classmates for years. You've got a kid now. Shouldn't I bring something?"

A second later, an email landed in my inbox. A confidentiality agreement.

The gist was simple. If Celeste ever found out what Lucas and I had been, the privately funded specialist team treating my mother would walk.

What made my skin crawl was that my mother's name had already been filled in.

Her liver cancer had come back and spread fast, and her local oncology team had run out of standard options.

Lucas was the one who'd introduced me to Dr. Everett Reese, a specialist he knew from grad school whose group took on the impossible cases.

Under that team, my mother had finally stabilized for a while.

I'd never imagined he'd turn her treatment into a leash.

Celeste gave Lucas a playful glare.

"Why are you being so harsh? She's only trying to be nice."

She opened a velvet box with a four-leaf-clover bracelet inside, the kind that comes from one of the big houses.

"You're one of Lucas's old classmates. I'd feel bad taking a gift like that from you without giving something back."

Hannah spoke up beside her. "Just take it. Celeste has plenty of pieces like that."

Celeste smiled. "Exactly. Don't be shy about it. My husband buys me things like this constantly.

"Sometimes he'll buy a whole matching set at once. It's honestly ridiculous."

Something twisted in my chest.

The entire time we were together, Lucas acted like he was barely scraping by.

Once, out shopping, I'd stopped in front of a bag and he offered to buy it for me.

I told him no and said I'd look for a used one online, because we were saving for a house.

He'd just finished complaining that his manager had held back one of his commissions.

I looked around at our mutual friends. One by one, they found reasons to leave.

They hadn't just hidden his marriage from me. They'd watched him play poor and said nothing.

I could picture exactly how ridiculous all those years of grinding must have looked to them the second I left the room.

I took the bracelet and walked out of that hospital in a fog.

It wasn't until I got back to my hotel that it finally broke and I cried.

When Lucas and I first got together, our friends used to joke that we were two broke kids clinging to each other.

I worked through college and still carried a big share of my mother's medical bills.

Lucas seemed even worse off, stretching every dollar until it snapped.

We both believed that if we worked hard enough together, it would get easier eventually.

Back then we couldn't afford more than a twelve-dollar pizza from the place on the corner, and we'd sit there talking until they started flipping the chairs onto the tables.

After graduation he insisted on going back to Harborwick to start a company, and I took an offer in Rosebridge. We told each other we'd build it from both ends.

At the airport he held me so tight I couldn't breathe and promised that once we had a home, we'd get married.

I waited six years.

For six years I ran like a machine.

Day job, freelance at night, weekend classes whenever I could get them.

At my worst I slept about four hours a night for three straight months and nearly landed myself in the ER.

And I thought I was happy. It never crossed my mind that the whole thing I was bleeding for wasn't real.

Chapter 3

Lucas came to my hotel that evening.

My eyes went hot the second I saw him.

"Why did you lie to me?"

If he'd told me the truth years ago, I wouldn't have worked myself sick trying to buy a place, and I wouldn't have promised my mother I'd finally bring home with my boyfriend.

Lucas held out a bank card.

"Iris, there's a quarter million dollars on this. The PIN is your birthday. Call it compensation.

"Celeste and I - it was arranged between the families. There's a lot I don't get to control."

For years he'd kept up the broke act and never sent me more than a couple hundred dollars at a time. Now he handed over a fortune without blinking.

I looked at the face I'd loved for ten years and felt every bit of that love come apart.

Something like regret moved through his eyes. "If you want, you can still stay with me.

"You can act as if nothing happened. We can go back to how it was, as long as you don't take it to Celeste."

My answer was a slap across his face.

Lucas worked his jaw where I'd hit him, and his face went dark.

"I'll admit I handled this badly, but I do care about you. Haven't I been good to you all these years?

"I paid for your mother's treatment. I covered your rent in Rosebridge. Even that project that got you promoted-I made that call for you.

"Stay with me, and I'll give you thirty thousand a month. Take your pick of any property I own."

Everything I thought I'd clawed out of the world myself had his fingerprints all over it.

He kept saying he cared about me while asking me to be the other woman in somebody else's marriage.

I threw him out. That same night I packed and decided I was done with Harborwick.

I was walking up to security at the airport when someone threw a bottle of water in my face.

"You're the one who went after my sister's husband? Do you have no shame?"

I stood there soaked in the middle of the terminal, and I could feel every pair of eyes on me.

Hannah was standing off to one side looking uncomfortable, and I asked her whether she thought I was the other woman too.

Hannah closed her eyes.

"Iris, even though we're close, I can't take your side just because you're my friend. You... are the other woman.

"Celeste is innocent in this. You can't wreck somebody's family."

The crowd started stirring, and somebody uploaded a video.

Within minutes strangers were calling me a homewrecker. My name, my university, and my employer were posted publicly for anyone to use.

My phone got hot in my hand from the flood of abusive calls and messages.

HR called me from work.

"Iris, don't come in for now. Wait until you hear from us."

Then the caregiver looking after my mother called.

"Ms. Caldwell, the specialist team is pulling out. They said you crossed someone you shouldn't have."

My mind went blank, and I called Lucas with my hands shaking.

"Why are you doing this to me?"

I could hear an argument on his end. He snarled into the phone that I'd brought this on myself, that Celeste knew I existed now, and that he'd warned me.

He hung up. With the abuse piling up online, I put together a timeline of my ten years with Lucas and posted it to prove I'd never knowingly been anyone's mistress.

It got mass-reported inside the hour, and then my account was gone.

For the first time in my life I understood how laughable it is to fight back against that kind of power.

Lucas called again.

"Go live and apologize to Celeste. She'll forgive you and we can keep going.

"My offer hasn't changed. You're smart, Iris. You know which way to go here."

Chapter 4

I was the one who'd been lied to for six years. I was the one who'd lost those years. And now I was the one the whole internet was calling a mistress.

Why should I apologize?

"That post of yours did real damage to Celeste. She's already putting together a defamation claim.

"If you don't apologize, even I won't be able to protect you."

I closed my eyes. "Fine. I'll apologize."

The stream filled with insults almost before it loaded.

I pulled one corner of my mouth up. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't just swallow it and keep quiet.

"I should have taken it calmly when the boyfriend I dated for ten years turned into somebody else's husband. What's six years of being made a fool of? You wear it and you move on."

Lucas killed the stream before I could get any further.

But the clips were already out, and the tags calling Celeste the actual other woman were already trending.

Lucas laughed once, furious. "Iris. Don't make me regret this for you."

A chill went up the back of my neck.

Then my mother's caregiver, Rita Alvarez, video-called me, and her voice was panicked before I even had the phone to my ear.

"Ms. Caldwell, a whole group of people came into your mother's room. They were screaming at her that she deserved the cancer, that she should rot.

"She couldn't take it. She went out the window."

Behind Rita's voice there were screams, and nurses running.

All of it got into my ears, and none of it would turn into meaning.

Lucas said coldly, "She went out a third-floor window, and she's still alive. Reese's team is right there in the building."

I half ran and half fell the whole way there, and in front of everyone I went down on my knees in front of Celeste.

"I'm sorry, Ms. Ashbury. I was out of line. Please, just let my mother alone."

Bree Nolan, Celeste's assistant, started another livestream, and I apologized into the camera with blood running down my face from where I'd split my forehead open on the stairs.

Every new insult scrolling past felt like another cut into something that was already in pieces.

Lucas's expression eased a little. He sent someone to go check on my mother, then stepped out to take a call.

The moment he was gone, Hannah came out of the corner of the room.

Celeste asked her, "Are the outside doctors gone?"

Hannah nodded.

For a second, I didn't understand what she meant. Then Rita called again.

"Ms. Caldwell, there were doctors and nurses on their way down. Then for some reason they turned around and left. She, she isn't breathing."

A white noise filled my head.

I stared at the two of them. "You did this."

Hannah helped me up and wiped the blood off my forehead.

"Iris, don't do this to yourself. Your mother was so sick. All those years of treatment weren't fixing anything. Isn't it better she isn't suffering anymore?"

They'd engineered my mother's death and were standing there telling me they'd done me a favor.

I couldn't understand how anyone could be that shameless.

Grief and rage took whatever judgment I had left. I grabbed the paring knife off the tray and went at them.

At that exact moment the door opened.

"Iris, stop!"

Lucas got between me and Celeste.

A breath before I reached him, somebody behind me wrenched my wrist around.

The knife turned back and went into my chest.

Warm blood sprayed across Lucas's stunned face.

His expression flipped straight into terror. He shoved Celeste out of the way and lunged for me.

"Iris!"