Chapter 2

I met Dominic Ashford when I was twenty-one and drowning.

Not metaphorically. Literally. I was working as a catering waitress at a rooftop party in Tribeca when a drunk hedge fund manager grabbed my arm and shoved me into the infinity pool as a joke. The crowd laughed. I couldn't swim.

Dominic pulled me out. His hand closed around my wrist and yanked me from the water like I weighed nothing. He didn't say "Are you okay." He said, "Who did this to you?" — and when someone pointed at the hedge fund manager, Dominic walked over to him and broke his nose.

I thought he was my hero.

Three weeks later, his lawyer contacted me. Not with a love letter. With a contract.

Dominic Ashford needed a wife. His grandfather's will stipulated that he must be married by thirty to inherit controlling shares of Ashford Holdings, a real estate empire worth eleven billion dollars. The marriage had to last a minimum of two years. It had to appear real.

"Why me?" I asked the lawyer, a thin man with no expression.

"Mr. Ashford requires someone with no social connections, no family ties, and no public profile," he said, sliding the contract across the table. "Someone who won't complicate things."

Someone disposable.

The terms were clinical. I would live in his penthouse. Attend public events as his wife. Share his bed when necessary for appearances. In return, I would receive five million dollars upon completion of the contract, and a signed NDA that would bury my existence.

I signed it because I had forty-seven dollars in my bank account and a landlord who had changed my locks.

The first six months were tolerable. Dominic was distant but not cruel. He worked eighteen-hour days, and I existed in the margins of his life — a shadow in designer clothes, smiling for cameras, eating alone at a table set for two.

I fell in love with him slowly, then all at once.

It was the small things. The way he'd leave his reading glasses on my nightstand, as if some unconscious part of him acknowledged I was there. The way he'd pause in the doorway of the bedroom, watching me sleep, before turning away. The night he came home at 3 a.m., drunk and defeated after losing a deal, and pressed his face into my hair and whispered, "Don't leave."

He never remembered saying it. I never forgot.

But there was always Seraphina.

I found the first clue in his study — a drawer locked with a key he wore around his neck. I never opened it. I didn't need to. The housekeeper, Rosa, told me everything.

"She was his whole world," Rosa said, her voice heavy with pity. "When she died in that accident, something in him died too. You're a sweet girl, Maren. But you'll never be her."

I absorbed the blow and kept smiling. I learned to read his moods, to anticipate his needs, to be so perfectly useful that he might mistake necessity for affection.

Then I got pregnant.

It wasn't planned. A single night when his control slipped, when he reached for me in the dark with a hunger that felt real. I lay awake afterward, his arm heavy across my waist, and let myself believe.

The pregnancy test showed two pink lines on a Tuesday morning. I held it in my trembling hands and cried — not from fear, but from a desperate, foolish hope that this tiny life might be the bridge between us.

I was going to tell him that night. I had made his favorite dinner. I had practiced my speech.

Then the elevator chimed, and Seraphina walked in, and the bridge collapsed before I could set foot on it.

Now, three days after being discarded, I sat in the free clinic in Brooklyn, staring at an ultrasound screen.

"There's your baby," the technician said, smiling. "Strong heartbeat. Healthy. About seventeen weeks."

I looked at the tiny, curled form on the screen, and for the first time since leaving the penthouse, I felt something other than pain. I felt purpose.

My phone buzzed. An unknown number.

Ms. Voss, this is Ashford Holdings Legal. Per Section 14 of your marital contract, you are required to return all personal items bearing the Ashford name within 72 hours. Failure to comply will result in legal action.

They were already erasing me. Seventy-two hours and I would cease to exist in Dominic Ashford's world.

I typed a reply: I have nothing of his.

Then I turned off the phone, pressed the printed ultrasound to my chest, and walked out into the cold.

I had seventy-two hours to disappear. And I knew exactly where to go.

A bus ticket to a small town in North Carolina cost sixty-three dollars. I had sixty-eight left.

As the bus pulled away from Port Authority, my phone lit up one final time. A text from Dominic's number. The first he had ever sent me directly.

Don't contact me again.

I read it twice. Then I removed the SIM card, snapped it in half, and dropped the pieces into the seat pocket in front of me.

The baby kicked for the first time somewhere between New Jersey and Delaware.

I pressed my hand to my stomach and whispered, "It's just us now."