“This is my home too,” I said, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew they weren’t true anymore. Nothing here was mine. Not the penthouse I’d helped decorate. Not the husband I’d loved with everything I had. Not even my own daughter.
“Not anymore,” Bianca said sweetly, stroking Ava’s hair with possessive fingers. “Damon and I have been together for over a year now. We’re a family.”
A year. They’d been carrying on their affair for a year while I’d been working sixteen-hour days building my marketing firm, trying to prove I was worthy of my husband’s attention and love.
“The divorce papers are already drawn up,” Damon said, his tone businesslike, as if he were discussing a merger instead of the destruction of our marriage. “Sign them and disappear. You’ll get enough money to start over somewhere else.”
“And Ava?”
“Stays with us. Bianca is the only mother she knows now.”
The casual cruelty in his voice shattered something fundamental inside me. This was the man I’d fallen in love with in college, the man I’d supported through law school, the man I’d sacrificed my own dreams for.
“How long?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
“How long what?”
“How long have you two been planning to replace me?”
Damon and Bianca exchanged a look that told me everything I needed to know. This hadn’t been a sudden affair born of passion—it had been a calculated takeover.
“Does it matter?” Damon shrugged. “You were never really present anyway. Always working, always traveling. Ava barely knew you existed.”
