Chapter 3

The metal edge went into my thigh like a knife into butter. My vision went white, then black at the edges. Blood soaked through my jeans in seconds, hot and sticky, running into my shoe. The smell of scorched canvas and scorched skin filled my mouth. "Damian—" I gasped. "My leg—" I looked up. He was already walking away with Celeste in his arms. He didn't turn around. "Don't be dramatic, Ivy. It's a scratch. The staff will handle it." Fourteen stitches. That's what "a scratch" cost me. I limped to the car myself and drove myself to the clinic and the nurse asked twice if I was safe at home. There was a time — a stupid, golden time — when I nicked my finger on a canvas staple and Damian went white as paper. He'd pulled me into his lap and pressed gauze to a paper cut like it was arterial. "So what if it's small? It still hurts. Ivy, I get anxious when a single hair falls off your head." That man was a costume. Celeste had a red mark on her cheek and he chartered a jet. I got home at midnight, unwrapped the gauze, and took off my wedding ring. Two carats. Five years. I dropped it in the kitchen trash on top of the coffee grounds and felt lighter than I had in a year. Then I went back to the studio and burned every canvas that had survived. On my way downstairs I passed the kitchen and stopped. Damian was cooking. Sleeves rolled, sauce on the stove, humming. I stood in the doorway with my thigh throbbing and remembered the one time I asked him to make me pasta on my birthday. "Ivy, I run a nine-billion-dollar company. I'm not going to be photographed with a saucepan for a woman. Let the chef do it." Turns out it was never about the company. He just never thought I was worth the effort. I didn't see him again for six days. I saw everything else. Celeste made sure of that. Photos every hour. Santorini. Kyoto. A private island in the Maldives. He's making it up to me for the slap, sorry not sorry. Videos I couldn't unsee, sent at 3 a.m. Some of them she printed and taped to the mirror in the master bedroom — my bedroom — until every photo of me in that house had been replaced by one of her. By day five, there wasn't a single picture of my face left in the home I'd built. On day six, a street reporter in Milan stopped them outside Prada and asked, laughing, if they were a couple. Celeste beamed straight into the lens. "Obviously!" Damian didn't correct her. He just looked down at her with a soft, private smile that used to be mine. It hit forty million views in eleven hours. By nightfall, everyone in our world had a name for me. Vance's discarded wife. People I'd hosted dinners for texted me heart emojis with nothing underneath. My mother-in-law told me to be more "flexible" at my age. I read the comments in the dark. She let herself go. The blonde's a smokeshow, can you blame him. Poor thing has no idea. I had every idea. And I remembered him at twenty-eight, drunk on cheap champagne in a walk-up with no heat, gripping my hands and promising: "You're the only one, Ivy. There will never be anyone else. Ever." Five years. That's how long "ever" lasted. I checked the date on my phone. Day seven. I zipped my suitcase, texted Ryder a single word — Tomorrow — and ordered a car to the airport for 6 a.m. At 5:40 a.m., the doorbell rang. It wasn't my driver. It was Marcus Hale, Damian's assistant, standing there with an umbrella and an apologetic face. "Mrs. Vance. Mr. Vance is waiting for you at the marina. He asked me to bring you." "I'm not going anywhere with him." Marcus swallowed. "Ma'am. He said if you refuse, he'll come get you himself. And he's had four hours of sleep." I knew what that meant. I'd learn later exactly how much cheaper it would have been to let him come. I got in the car. Because here's what I didn't know as I stepped onto that yacht in the grey dawn light, with fourteen stitches in my leg and a boarding pass in my coat pocket: In three hours, I'd be drowning in the Atlantic, screaming his name. And he'd be sailing away.