Chapter 1
Then I walked into my client Hannah Blake’s father’s funeral.
Hannah, her eyes swollen red from weeping, had slipped her arm through Adrian’s with a sickening, effortless familiarity. As she introduced me to her “fiancée,” my entire world fractured. Adrian stood there in a tailored black mourning suit, a white memorial flower pinned to his lapel, staring at me with horror frozen behind his cold, calculating eyes. When Hannah mentioned that Adrian had been her rock for the past three months—coordinating top-tier medical specialists, orchestrating private hospital transfers, and holding her hand through every harrowing hour—the floor beneath me vanished.
Three months. Exactly the duration of his "German business trip."
Worse still, a year earlier, when my own father was drawing his final, agonizing breaths in a sterile hospital room just three hours away by flight, I had called Adrian from the stairwell, sobbing and begging him to come say goodbye. He had sighed, told me he had too many people depending on him, and coldly refused to drop everything just so I could cry. My father died alone that night. But for Hannah Blake, Adrian hadn’t just dropped everything—he had practically moved into the hospital, orchestrating doctors, security, and funeral arrangements like a devoted husband.
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When Adrian finally slipped away from Hannah to corner me in the hallway, his arrogant attempt to silence me with a dismissive "Go home. Wait for me" was the final straw. His phone rang with Hannah's call, and without a second thought, he abandoned me in the corridor to rush back to her side.
He told me to wait for him. But as I drove back to our penthouse that rainy afternoon, stepping into the silent, luxurious cage we shared, I knew I was done waiting. I packed half my wardrobe, grabbed my essential documents, and stripped my diamond wedding ring from my finger, leaving it glittering coldly right in the center of his bedside table. When Adrian finally returned home expecting a submissive, waiting wife, he found an empty closet, a cold bed, and a silence more deafening than any explosion.
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