Seven years ago, to keep my dying mother alive, I worked eight jobs a day, and even that barely touched the medical bills that swallowed us whole.
Then one afternoon, in the middle of a delivery run, I came upon a car wreck. I called for help, and only then noticed the fuel leaking from the wreckage.
The moment I'd dragged everyone clear, the car went up in flames.
When the rescue crew arrived, I climbed back on my bike and rode off, never dreaming that one rescue would rewrite my entire life.
Not long after, a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Rowe of the Rowe Group sought me out. Her son had been left comatose, she told me, and a fortune-teller had read our birth charts and declared them a perfect match.
She asked if I would become her daughter-in-law, marrying him to turn his luck and save his life. The compensation she offered was considerable.
For my mother's sake, I agreed. I signed a private contract with Mrs. Rowe, and on the strength of her promises, I took on the burden of nursing her son.
After a full year of my care, uncomplaining through every hardship, James Rowe finally woke.
With the media circling and the pressure mounting, he married me once he opened his eyes.
At first our life together was happy enough. He even tried to accept me. But three years in, when my mother passed, James changed completely.
He started staying out all night. He stopped answering my messages, ignored my calls, and flew into a rage if I so much as said a word or two to him.
Then came the kept women, a new one every few days. Now and then one would last three months, but every last one got swapped out in the end.
Until Marcella Pruitt appeared. The day I sent someone to dig into her background happened to be the day of my prenatal checkup.
But before that file ever reached my hands, she stabbed me thirteen times.
It was only after I finally saw her in person that I understood why James guarded her the way he did.
She bore a striking resemblance to his first love. Those eyes, especially. They were too alike.
The contract was nearly up anyway. This marriage, this living hell, was due to end.
I pulled myself back to the present and looked at the last line of the email——“Would you be willing to join us?”
Without hesitation, I pressed “Yes,” then sent off a reply, letting them know I would arrive in Maldea in four days.
Once that was done, I went straight to check myself out of the hospital.
Back home, I began erasing every trace I'd ever lived there.
Matching clothes, matching slippers, matching little couple's trinkets, all of it went into the trash.
While clearing out the vanity, I found a pair of pink pearl earrings, James's gift for our first anniversary.
I could still see him then, his eyes soft, his movements stiff as he fastened them on me. “My Connie can pull off anything! From now on, I'm buying you so many more pearls!”
A pity. From our fourth anniversary on, James never gave me another. He stopped marking the holidays altogether.
Every time, I'd cook a full table of food, and he'd stay out all night. I'd plant myself stubbornly at that table until dawn, and still he wouldn't come home, and the food would go cold.
Just like this lopsided marriage of ours, growing bleaker by the day.
I steadied myself, dropped the earrings into the trash, and pulled open a drawer to find it crammed with the written promises James had once given me.
In those first three years, every time he wronged me, James would write me a promise. And every one of them began the same way——“CV.”
My name is Constance Vance.
Back then, drowning in that sweet, happy marriage, I thought those letters were his own private pet name for me.
A pity I'd guessed wrong.
A year ago, I learned that James carried a first love in his heart. When he'd crashed that car, she had been inside it with him.
She wasn't among the people I pulled out. I looked into it later and understood: she'd been thrown into the gap between the back seat and the trunk, completely outside my line of sight, and so she missed her best chance at rescue.
That girl was named——“Celia Vance.”
So “CV” had been hers alone.
The instant I knew the truth, I finally understood why every promise James wrote carried such thick guilt, such deep self-reproach.
He'd been atoning to his first love. Through me.
I crushed the promise in my hand, and my heart felt like two invisible hands had ripped it clean in two, the pain so sharp I couldn't stand.
One hand braced on the vanity, the other sweeping every last promise into the trash.
Anything that was never mine, I want none of it.
