Prologue
CHELSEA CHECKED HERsmartwatch.
How strange.
She gazed at the numbers, but they didn’t change. Her heart was still able to beat normally even when a single conversation had just broken it into pieces.
Her gaze turned to her stepmother’s retreating back, but tears blurred everything before she could make sense of it. Francesca was already through the cafe door, not rushing, not looking back. The way a person left when they’d done what they came to do, and the aftermath was someone else’s problem.
The cafe kept going around her. Someone laughed at the table behind her. A barista called out a name. The trailing plants above the counter swayed in the draft from the door, and Chelsea sat there with her hands wrapped around a chamomile tea that had gone cold, and her fingers were trembling so badly that the liquid inside the cup was making small, concentric circles.
She’d seen those circles before.
In the bath. This morning. When her husband’s hands had moved through her hair and the water had rippled—
Stop it, Chels.
This morning was a different world, and so it no longer felt right to remember that time. When she had woken up in his arms this morning, and he had kissed her forehead, and she had kissed him back...
When she had stood in the foyer in his stolen t-shirt and already counting the minutes before they could be together again...
That world was gone.
And it might never even have been real.
But now though...
This world she was living in now...hurt.
And it hurt even more when her phone buzzed, and a part of her just wanted to hide and pretend and lie to herself. But this world had somehow turned her into a masochist, and she ended up looking anyway.
Olivio.
He was texting her...like usual. And honestly, she’d been like everyone else in the past, thinking that a billionaire like Olivio Cannizzaro would think of texting as beneath him. People should be the one calling and sending him messages, not the other way around.
And yet...in the nine days they’d been married, Olivio had texted her.
All the time.
And she used to think (foolishly, she realized now) his texts were proof that she was important. But now, oh God...
How is your day, tesoro?
The preview on the screen was enough to show the entirety of his message, and every word just...hurt. It wasn’t so long ago that this message would’ve made Chelsea bite her lip in an effort to keep her lips from forming another silly little smile. It wasn’t so long ago that she would’ve been quick to text him back, shyly but eagerly, because it meant so much to know that her very busy husband remembered her and wanted to know about her day.
But now, though...
The message was a blur like the rest of her surroundings, the tears making it impossible to see everything clearly with her eyes while the pain made it impossible for her heart to understand anything.
Her hands were shaking so badly it took a while before she could even dig her phone out of her purse, and it took three painful attempts to even scroll through her contacts just to find Edgar’s name and hit theCallbutton.
So far, blinking rapidly had kept the tears at bay, but she knew it was only a matter of time. She knew it was painfully inevitable, and that sooner or later...
Is this really happening, God?
Can't this just be a dream?
Please.
