It had been eighteen months since Mark walked out. Eighteen months of rebuilding my life from the ashes of the fire he started. He didn’t just leave. He emptied our joint savings, moved into a penthouse, and told everyone in our social circle that I was unstable and lazy.
Then I looked at the plus-one line.
In his own handwriting, he had added:
Bring a date, Elena, if you can find one who doesn’t mind the baggage.
The audacity hit like a slap.
He didn’t want me there to celebrate. He wanted me there as a prop. He wanted his high-powered colleagues and his younger bride to see that he had won. He wanted me standing in the back of the church, tired and defeated, while he married the woman he had been seeing behind my back for two years.
A small hand touched my shoulder.
I jumped and quickly slid the invitation under a pile of bills.
“Mommy, why are you crying?”
It was Leo, five years old, with his father’s messy black hair but my wide, soulful eyes. Liam stood behind him, clutching his stuffed dinosaur.
“I’m not crying, baby,” I lied, forcing a smile that felt like it was cracking my face. “Just some dust in my eye.”
“Is that a party card?” Liam asked, pointing at the edge of the envelope. “Are we going to a party?”
I looked at my boys.
They were my everything.
Mark hadn’t called them in three months. He missed their birthdays because he was “too busy with the merger.” The idea of taking them to a wedding where they’d be paraded around like trophies for a man who didn’t deserve them made my stomach twist.
I was about to throw the invitation in the trash when my phone buzzed.
It was a text from Julian.
Julian Vane.
CEO of Vane Global. Mark’s boss.
