Chapter 1

The day I gave birth to his son, Ryan Carter didn't even show up at the hospital. He sent his assistant instead—with divorce papers and a check for fifty thousand dollars.

The reason? My sister told him I had cheated, and the baby wasn't his.

I had just been in labor for twenty-six hours. My body was torn apart. My newborn was crying in the incubbus beside me, still red and wrinkled and reaching for a mother who could barely lift her arms.

And the man I had married—the billionaire CEO of Carter Group, the man whose child I had carried for nine agonizing months—couldn't even be bothered to come see his own son.

His assistant, a young man who couldn't meet my eyes, placed the documents on the bedside table.

"Mr. Carter says if you sign now, he'll add another twenty thousand. He'd prefer this to be... clean."

Clean.

As if I were a stain he needed to wipe away.

I looked at my baby. He had Ryan's eyes—dark, deep-set, unmistakable.

Anyone with half a brain could see the resemblance. But Ryan had chosen to believe my sister, Vanessa, without even looking at his own child.

Of course he did. He'd always loved her.

Our marriage was never real. It was an arrangement—my parents had offered me up when Vanessa refused to marry a man she considered "beneath her ambitions." Back then, Carter Group was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Ryan was desperate for the investment my family's company could provide.

So I became the substitute bride.

For one year, I cooked his meals, managed his household, and warmed a bed he never once slept in.

Then Vanessa came back from abroad, and everything changed.

She moved into our home. Ryan gave her the master bedroom—our bedroom—and told me to sleep in the guest room.

"She's not used to being alone," he said, as if that explained everything.

When I got pregnant, I thought things might change. I thought he'd finally see me.

Instead, Vanessa whispered in his ear that I'd been sneaking out at night, that the baby couldn't possibly be his.

He never even asked me for my side of the story.

Now, lying in that hospital bed, I watched his assistant shift uncomfortably by the door.

"Mrs. Carter? Will you sign?"

I picked up the pen.

My hands were still shaking from the birth, and every movement sent pain shooting through my body.

But I signed.

I signed every page without reading a single word.

Then I looked at my son one final time and said to the assistant, "Tell Ryan he'll regret this."

The assistant gave an awkward, pitying smile—the kind people wear when they think you're delusional.

Three years later, I came back.

Not as the unwanted wife he'd thrown away, but as Dr. Grace Mitchell—the youngest chief surgeon at the most prestigious hospital in the country, the medical genius every corporation in the world was fighting to recruit.

And the first patient on my schedule?

Ryan Carter's dying mother.

The woman who had helped Vanessa destroy my marriage.