I discovered Damian's affair on our fifth wedding anniversary.

I'd prepared a surprise in a hotel suite. Stepping out briefly, I spotted him at the far end of the hallway, arm wrapped around a woman. Raven hair, crimson lips, breathtaking beauty. They couldn't keep their hands off each other.


I sat alone in that suite from midday until sunset.

At eight, Damian returned bearing an emerald necklace.

Identical to the one I'd glimpsed around her throat.


"Lori, happy fifth anniversary." He smiled, leaning in for a kiss.

I turned away.


"Where were you?"

"Just a business thing," he replied smoothly. "If it bothers you, I'll skip it next time."

Hours of tension snapped like a wire. I exploded, screaming, smashing everything breakable within reach.

"How could you do this? You fucking liar!"

My mother's dead face flashed before me. History repeating itself—my husband, just like my monster of a father, betraying me with another woman.

Damian pulled me close as we knelt amid the wreckage. He wept, apologies tumbling from his lips.

"I'm so sorry, Lori. She was just… it was just a mistake…"

"I've ended it with her. Please, baby, don't do this."

Like a fool, I believed him.

Afterward, Damian supposedly blacklisted an actress named Sienna Ross. I struggled to erase those images, desperate to rebuild what we'd had.

Until Sienna's package arrived.

Inside: intimate photos. The note read: "Your husband's quite the actor—publicly blacklisting me while privately keeping me as his personal plaything."

I confronted him. He pinched the bridge of his nose with irritation.

"Look, Sienna's different from you. You were born with a silver spoon—she wasn't. She clawed her way up in this cutthroat industry. I just… feel for her, that's all."

"I've explained this—sex and love are different things. You're the one I love. Can you stop making such a damn scene about it?"

In that moment, I saw the real Damian for the first time. It felt like plunging into arctic waters.

I fought back. Called every paparazzi contact I had to expose Sienna's scandal. But Damian's influence buried it all.

He personally orchestrated Sienna's rise to A-list status.

Then he forced the divorce. The prenup was brutal—deliberately so—leaving me with nothing.

"Lori, you're getting nothing from this divorce," he said coolly before the lawyers. "Why worry about material things? You can always be Mrs. Blackwood again—if you learn your place."

For exactly 179 days afterward, each morning felt like dying anew.

Sleepless nights bled into days of uncontrollable tremors and vomiting bile. My hands shook too badly to hold a paintbrush—my only real skill, my livelihood, gone.

I spiraled into obsession. Gnawed my wrists bloody, scrolled through Sienna's thousands of posts endlessly, hunting for Damian's shadow in every frame, desperate to pinpoint when their betrayal began.

I created fake accounts to hurl the vilest curses at them both.

I hadn't shattered our marriage, yet I was the one walking barefoot through the broken pieces every day.

Then came that day in the hospital lobby—me clutching my cancer diagnosis, them strolling in for Sienna's routine checkup.

I was skeletal, my face gaunt as a corpse.

They were golden, glowing with health and wealth.

"Lori," Damian frowned, his expression unreadable. "You look terrible."

Something broke inside me. Tears flooded out like a burst dam.

The terror of dying alone crushed everything else.

I was terrified of ending like my mother—alone in some dingy apartment, my body discovered days later.

I needed an anchor—something to prove I still existed. Even this bullet-riddled love was better than nothing.

So I swallowed my pride.

"Damian," I whispered, "I was wrong."

His lips curved into a satisfied smile.

We remarried.