1 The second time I met my college crush, he was a broken man. His startup had gone bankrupt, his son was in a wheelchair, and his "ride-or-die" high school sweetheart had abandoned him. At a public park, Arthur gently approached my food truck. "Can I just buy half a breakfast sandwich?" I nodded and handed him a few for free. Years later, we had built a tech empire from the ground up, standing at the absolute pinnacle of Silicon Valley. On the day Arthur's company filed for its IPO and his son got accepted into Stanford, his ex-wife came back. Chloe looked just as young and beautiful as her old photos, wearing a pristine white dress, looking completely innocent. Compared to the luxury cars I had arranged for the celebration, she pulled out a stack of handmade "Good Mom Coupons" as a graduation gift for his son. "Leo, these were your absolute favorite when you were little. With these, you can make Mommy spend time with you whenever you want." Then, she pulled out a heart-shaped river stone and pressed it into my husband's hand. "Arthur, this represents my heart. It will never change for you." Only after doing all of this did she finally turn to look at me. Her eyes were brimming with pure contempt. "Thank you for looking after my husband and son during the years I was lost with amnesia." "But now that the genuine article is back, you, the temporary substitute, can leave." I raised an eyebrow and looked at Arthur. When Chloe left him, Arthur was deeply depressed for three entire years. He had attempted suicide seven times. He had sworn to me that he would rather die than forgive his ex-wife. I was incredibly curious to see what he would choose now. ... Arthur held the stone, staring coldly at Chloe. His eyes were unreadable. But only I knew that the exact second Chloe appeared, Arthur's grip on my hand tightened so hard it actually hurt. I smiled calmly and gently patted his hand. "Chloe, your 'amnesia' just happened to start the exact month Leo broke his legs and Arthur declared bankruptcy? What an incredible medical coincidence." I said this not only to humiliate Chloe, but to remind Arthur. Arthur set the stone aside. "Chloe, please leave. You are not welcome here." The moment he said that, Chloe's eyes immediately turned red. "Arthur, how could you treat me like this? I just had amnesia, it's not like I stopped loving you and Leo!" "How could you betray me while my memory was gone and get with this woman?" "She's obviously just using you for your company's wealth. Can't you see that?" Before anyone could react... Smack. Arthur delivered a merciless, ringing slap across her face. "Evelyn is my wife. I will not allow anyone to slander her." Chloe clutched her cheek, massive tears rolling down her face. "Arthur, you hit me? For her? You're driving me to my death! I don't want to live anymore!" She turned and made a dramatic dash for the rooftop terrace. The guests scrambled to stop her. Arthur just said coldly, "Let her jump. Don't stop her." But at that moment, Leo lost his temper. "Dad! That's my mom! Do you actually want her to die?!" Saying that, he knocked over the massive 23-tier cake and the champagne tower I had spent weeks preparing for him, and sprinted toward the rooftop without looking back. The celebration hall was instantly reduced to a chaotic mess. Arthur didn't seem to care. He insisted on driving me home first. But after years of marriage, it only took one glance for me to see that his mind was already completely gone. Sure enough, the second I got into the car, he said, "Evelyn, I just remembered there's an emergency at the office. I need to go handle it." He walked away without looking back. Ten minutes later, my informants at the company sent me a live feed. In the deserted emergency stairwell, Chloe had her arms wrapped tightly around Arthur's neck, kissing him deeply. Arthur didn't respond, but he didn't push her away either. He just let her kiss him. His hands were balled into tight fists at his sides, as if he was restraining himself with everything he had. After a long, breathless kiss, Chloe finally spoke. "Admit it, Arthur. You still love me, don't you? Why are you fighting it?" She reached down, took his clenched fists, and pried his fingers open. "Look. Your nails are digging so hard you're bleeding." "Enough." Arthur snatched his hands back. "Chloe, when you betrayed me back then, you should have known you would never get a second chance in this lifetime." Chloe stared dead into Arthur's eyes. "Fine. Then I'll go jump right now to apologize with my life." The second she turned around, Arthur grabbed her wrist in a death grip. "Didn't you say you didn't care about me anymore? Why are you stopping me?" Before she could finish, Arthur crashed his lips onto hers in a deep, wildly aggressive kiss. The wet, sickening sound of their intertwined breathing echoed crystal clear through my AirPods. A long time later, Arthur finally pulled back, gripping the back of Chloe's neck. "Chloe, hate lasts longer than love. I'm going to make you live the rest of your life suffocating in guilt over what you did to me." It felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped over my head. My entire body went numb. The tightly wound string in my heart—the one I had been holding onto since Chloe reappeared—finally snapped. I didn't listen to the rest. That night, the moment I got home, I called my lawyers and began a total audit of my and Arthur's shared assets. At the same time, I signed my name on the divorce papers Arthur had pre-signed years ago for emergencies. It was an exit strategy I built for myself, hoping I would never have to use it. I just never expected the day to come this fast. 2 Eight years ago, Arthur was the undisputed, uncrowned king of the Bay Area tech scene. And I was just a nobody who had barely scraped my way into the industry. On the keynote stage, he stood tall and arrogant, bursting with ambition, like an untouchable pine tree. I sat in the very back row of the auditorium, clutching my company brochure, too intimidated to even clap too loudly. I never expected that the next time I saw Arthur, six months later, it would be at a noisy, greasy food truck park. I was working a second job running a food truck to save up seed money for my own startup. Arthur was pushing Leo in a wheelchair, out for a walk. By then, he had lost all his former glory. He was so broke he actually had to ask if he could just buy half a sandwich. From industry gossip, I learned what happened. Arthur had been defrauded by a business partner he had trusted for years. His tech empire, built over a decade, collapsed into dust in less than a month. As if that wasn't enough, Leo was in a horrible accident and shattered both his legs, and Arthur's mother suffered a massive stroke from the stress. Within three days of the bankruptcy, Chloe's family publicly severed all ties with Arthur. That very same night, Chloe vanished without a trace. Arthur completely shattered. He developed severe clinical depression. After that night at the food truck, for some reason, the lonely silhouettes of the father and son haunted my mind. Every night, I kept an eye out for them. I started giving them free meals. Over time, we grew close. I pulled him into the AI sector—a field I was heavily researching but hadn't blown up yet. Our equally sharp business instincts made us a perfect match. Naturally, we soon became a couple. While Chloe was in Beverly Hills, re-married as a trophy wife, getting luxury manicures... I was wiping Arthur's mother, emptying her bedpans, and washing her soiled clothes. In the dead of winter, my hands cracked and bled from constantly being submerged in freezing water. While Chloe was taking floral arrangement classes and sipping matcha lattes... I was watching YouTube tutorials on physical therapy massage techniques, hauling a teenage Leo onto my shoulders to force him through his painful rehab exercises step by step. While Chloe was traveling the world posting Instagram photos... I was sleeping two hours a night developing the core code for Arthur's new company. I didn't even dare to sleep deeply, terrified that if I closed my eyes, Arthur might try to kill himself again in the middle of the night. Eventually, the billionaire Chloe married went to prison for fraud. She had lived in absolute luxury for a decade. And now, she suddenly remembered her "true love," wanting to come back and effortlessly steal the fruits of my agonizing labor. She wanted me gone. Who the hell did she think she was? Just as I hung up with my lawyer, the front door clicked open. Arthur walked in, on a phone call. His PR team was on speakerphone, asking if he wanted to file a defamation lawsuit against Chloe for the stunt she pulled at the party today. I stared at him. Sure enough, his eyes darted away. He hesitated for a long moment, then shook his head. "Forget it. Let's just let today's incident slide." When his eyes finally met mine, he jumped slightly and immediately hung up the phone. He offered a stiff, robotic explanation: "I just... I don't want to have any more ties to Chloe. A lawsuit would drag it out." "And if I say no?" "What?" I had never spoken to Arthur with such an icy, detached tone. He looked momentarily disoriented. "If I say I refuse to drop it? What will you do?" "Do you have any idea how critical today's celebration was for our IPO pricing this week?" "You think an absurd, humiliating circus like this can just be brushed under the rug?" Arthur subconsciously frowned, looking at me with exhausted exasperation. "Evelyn, it was just a minor hiccup. Why are you escalating this? I've already had the PR team suppress the stock rumors." The gentle, patronizing tone of his voice made my chest tighten to the point of pain. "Alright, stop being angry. Come on, I'll take you out to dinner." Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed my arm and dragged me out the door. 3 But he drove us to a restaurant I absolutely hated. The second we sat down, Leo walked in. And he brought Chloe with him. "Dad, Mom didn't have anywhere to eat, so I brought her along." I stood up immediately to leave. Arthur grabbed my wrist. "Evelyn, it's just one meal. Don't be so petty." Chloe shot me a triumphant smirk and sat down right at the table. She immediately started arranging the silverware for Arthur and Leo, acting exactly like the lady of the house. I laughed. Suddenly, I didn't want to leave either. I sat back down and pulled up the digital menu on my phone. Why should I let myself go hungry? While ordering, Arthur and Leo coincidentally selected several of Chloe's favorite dishes at the exact same time. The two of them exchanged an awkward, knowing smile, then one of them deleted the duplicates. I didn't care. I just ordered my own favorite expensive steaks and seafood. When I finished, Chloe suddenly decided to play the frugal housewife. "Wow, this is a lot of food. The four of us probably can't finish all this, right?" Arthur glanced at the digital cart. Without even asking me, he deleted every single item I had ordered. Speechless, I snatched the tablet back and re-added all my food. Arthur seemed to suddenly realize how bad he looked. He scratched the back of his neck and kept his mouth shut. While waiting for the food, Chloe casually turned to Leo. "Hey, where's that emergency contact form for school you wanted me to sign?" I watched as Leo pulled out the school form. Under "Father," it said Arthur. Under "Mother," it said Chloe. A memory from years ago flashed through my mind. Back then, Leo's legs had just healed, but he still walked with a severe limp. The kids in his class constantly mocked him, and the local gang members near the high school regularly bullied him for cash. He never told anyone. I only found out when I saw the bruises covering his ribs. That exact day, I grabbed a baseball bat from the garage and drove straight to the alley where the gang hung out. At first, they laughed at me. Until I took over fifty hits from a steel pipe, legs shaking, and still managed to stand back up and swing at them. They got scared. After that day, nobody ever messed with Leo again. Once my own broken ribs healed, I spent hours every single day stretching Leo's muscles, painfully correcting his posture until his limp vanished entirely. From that day forward, Leo quietly changed his school emergency contact to my name. But the second Chloe came back, without doing a single damn thing, everything reverted right back to the original default. I didn't want to think about it anymore. When the food arrived, I ate in silence. Chloe took a bite of a spicy dish and coughed. Both father and son immediately panicked, reaching for her water. Chloe smiled gently and dropped her half-eaten food directly into Arthur's bowl. "Don't want to waste it." Arthur didn't say a word. He just picked it up with his fork and ate it. When dinner ended, Chloe suddenly announced she needed to speak with me alone. She told Arthur and Leo to go to the car first. I had zero interest in entertaining her. I turned and walked toward the street, but she followed me like a shadow. I didn't realize she was actually insane. When we reached a Y-shaped intersection near the parking garage, she violently shoved me forward. We ended up standing in the middle of the road, splitting the two lanes. She was on the right, I was on the left. Arthur and Leo's cars came speeding around the blind corner side-by-side. When they saw Chloe and me standing in the middle of the road, their eyes went wide with horror. It was too late to brake. To the left, me. To the right, Chloe. In a fraction of a second, the tires shrieked violently against the asphalt. Both cars simultaneously swerved directly toward me. CRASH! Shutterstock It wasn't a graze. It was a solid, sickeningly heavy impact that vibrated through every internal organ in my body. Agonizing pain instantly consumed my entire nervous system. My body didn't feel like my own. I flew through the air, completely weightless, before slamming brutally against the pavement. Laying on the freezing asphalt, I could hear the sound of my own bones shattering. Warm liquid gushed from my forehead and mouth. The taste of rust filled my throat. My vision was a blur of crimson, my ears ringing with a deafening siren. But through the blood, I could clearly see Chloe mouthing the words at me: "You lose." And I could clearly hear Arthur and Leo's panicked voices, asking if Chloe was okay. ... I woke up in the hospital to the sound of screaming. "Chloe, do you have any idea how dangerous it is to stand in the middle of the road?! Is that a joke to you?! Stop this! How many times do I have to tell you? I don't love you anymore! Get out of my house! I have my own life now!" "No! If I can't have you, no one can! I only left because I had amnesia, it wasn't my fault! Arthur, you belong to me. You will always belong to me!" "Admit it, Arthur! You and Leo still have me in your hearts! You both still love me!" The argument lasted for a full thirty minutes. Neither of them backed down an inch. Leo stood between them, trying to mediate. The three of them looked exactly like a dysfunctional, but deeply connected, family. I had been awake the entire time, but none of them even noticed. My throat was so dry it felt like sandpaper. I forced my shattered body to reach for the water cup on the nightstand. My hand slipped. The glass shattered on the floor. Only then did the screaming abruptly stop. Arthur rushed over to my bed, grabbing my hand tightly, looking incredibly heartbroken. "Evelyn! You're finally awake! Do you have any idea how worried I was?!" "Get out. Every single one of you, GET OUT!" My explosive scream finally brought silence to the room. For the next few days, as if trying to prove his loyalty to me, Arthur intentionally forced Chloe to act as my caretaker in the hospital as "punishment." But Chloe tortured me. She dropped dead roaches into my hospital food. She unplugged my oxygen monitor when I fell asleep. She secretly swapped out my pain meds. Because of her, I was rushed into emergency resuscitation three different times. Arthur would yell at her, but in the end, he always just let it slide with a warning. I finally saw this man's true, ugly face in high definition. I banned all visitors, hired my own private nurses, and finally managed to get discharged. 4 The very first thing I did after leaving the hospital was go to the company headquarters to finalize the asset division. But the second I stepped out of the elevator, I froze. The entire office interior had been changed. My carefully designed, sleek minimalist black-and-grey decor had been replaced with aggressively loud Barbie pink. The weekly executive meeting, which I always led, was currently being chaired by Chloe. "I don't care who you thought the 'lady of the house' was before. From this second forward, I am the queen of this company. I am the CEO's legal wife. Certain thieves who stole other people's lives will be kicked out of this building very soon. I suggest you all open your eyes and pick the right side." As soon as she finished speaking, several of the most powerful investors in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, who were sitting at the VIP table, began clapping. These were titans of the industry. They wouldn't have showed up unless Arthur personally begged them to. So, Arthur called in all his favors and brought the biggest sharks in the valley here, just to give Chloe a power trip. I suddenly remembered our early startup days. I had fallen violently ill with an undiagnosed autoimmune flare-up. The pain was so unbearable I begged Arthur to use his leftover connections to get me an appointment with a top specialist. He refused, claiming it was "too humiliating" to beg his old contacts for a favor. I suffered in blinding agony for two solid months until my body fought it off alone. The canyon between being loved and unloved is truly bottomless. I was about to push the glass doors open and reclaim my boardroom, but a hand clamped down on my wrist. It was Leo. Funny. Leo never came to the office. But he was here today, clearly acting as Chloe's bodyguard. Leo coldly pulled out an equity transfer notice, signed by Arthur. "This is Dad's order. He's making my mom a founding shareholder, with the exact same voting power as you." "Since you're barren and have no kids anyway, this entire company is going to be mine eventually. My mom taking over is inevitable. There's no point in you throwing a tantrum now." Hearing the word "barren," I let out a dry laugh. When Arthur and I first got married, Leo was incredibly emotionally unstable and absolutely refused to accept a younger sibling. Because of that, I chose to go on birth control for years. Later, when Leo grew up and didn't care as much, I started agonizing, high-risk IVF treatments at an older age. I finally got pregnant, but due to a vicious internal corporate war Arthur dragged me into, the stress caused a miscarriage. I got pregnant again three years later. But to secure the flagship enterprise contract that saved our company, I worked myself to the bone. The baby died in the womb. On the day of the induced labor, I cried until my vocal cords bled. Arthur held me tightly in the hospital bed, sobbing, swearing to God he would never let me suffer even a fraction of pain ever again. Out of crushing guilt toward the babies I lost, I decided I would never try to have kids again. And now, all my sacrifices, all my compromises, earned me exactly one sentence from Leo: "Since you're barren anyway." I shoved him away, walked straight to my private office, and started packing my things. Once the asset split was complete, the company would be divided. I had absolutely no intention of staying in this polluted wasteland for a second longer. Seeing me packing boxes, Arthur walked in. "Evelyn, what are you doing?" "Throwing out some useless garbage," I said coldly. Hearing my tone, Arthur spoke cautiously. "Are you mad that I brought Chloe to the office?" "Don't misunderstand. Leo said a psychic told him Chloe's astrological chart brings good luck to the IPO this year. That's the only reason I let her in." "Just treat her like a mascot! Once the year is over, I'll kick her out. Don't overthink it." "And the shares? A mascot needs a 20% equity stake?" Arthur choked on his words. It took him a long time to awkwardly reply, "The billionaire she married went bankrupt. She's a woman with no job history and no degree, it's hard for her to survive in this economy. The shares are just..." "Stop." I was so done listening to his garbage. I pulled the office door open, ready to tell Arthur to get the hell out. But suddenly, Chloe came stumbling out from the end of the hallway. Her clothes were torn, her hair was a mess, and there were bleeding scratches on her face. "Arthur! Help! Help me..." She gritted her teeth, using all her strength to grab Arthur's sleeve. When she saw me, her entire body went rigid. She immediately lowered her head, let go of him, and stumbled backward in terror. "E-Evelyn... I'm sorry! I was wrong, I won't do it again! I'll leave California right now, I promise I'll never..." A perfect, cinematic tear rolled down her cheek. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes. "I'll never appear in front of Arthur ever again." Then, she turned and limped toward the elevators, looking like the most tragic, bullied victim on earth. I was completely stunned. Her acting was so hyper-realistic, for a second I genuinely questioned if I had hired a hitman to beat her up and warn her away from my husband. I let out a sarcastic sneer and turned to observe Arthur's reaction. His face was completely blank. I couldn't read his mind at all. "Do you actually think I did that to her?" I asked, testing him. He pulled me into a hug. "I know you. You would never do something like that." I nodded. At least he still had one microscopic shred of a conscience left. However, the very next morning, I received an emergency call from my lawyer. "Ms. Davis, your husband utilized his CEO veto power to unilaterally expel you from the Board of Directors. All of your vested equity has been illegally transferred to a holding company under Chloe's name." "And... Mr. Evans just issued a company-wide gag order. No one is allowed to tell you the time and location of the IPO bell-ringing ceremony in New York. Because he is taking Ms. Chloe with him to ring the bell." I was completely paralyzed. The stock price had finally stabilized. The company was about to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. And at the absolute finish line, he kicked me off the board, stole the fruits of my decade of blood and sweat, and handed it all to her? And he was taking her to ring the bell? My entire decade of pure, devoted love had officially become the biggest joke of the century. On the day of the IPO, Chloe was dressed in a million-dollar haute couture gown, blinding the paparazzi with her diamonds. Watching Chloe link arms with Arthur and walk up to the NYSE balcony, the entire financial world assumed the tech empire officially had a new queen. The exchange president respectfully invited Chloe to the center of the podium. Arthur held Chloe's hand, raising the gavel high in the air. Just a millisecond before the gavel struck the bell, a voice from the floor below echoed through the hall. "Hold on."
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