At our 10th wedding anniversary celebration, two children I'd never seen before suddenly threw their arms around my husband and called him Daddy.   Vincent Doyle didn't like children, so after we married, I'd agreed to a child-free marriage for his sake.   The Doyle family and several of Vincent's old classmates insisted that the children had simply mistaken him for someone else.   But the moment I saw their mother, my blood ran cold. She looked almost exactly like Vincent's first love, who had died years ago.

The wedding ring my fiancé and I had chosen together ended up on my sister's ring finger the night before our wedding.   "Your future husband insisted on seeing which of us had the better memory," she said, nudging Ethan Caldwell affectionately with her shoulder. "He lost, so he gave me the five-carat diamond ring. I told him that little snack shop outside Aldercrest High School had been torn down, but he wouldn't believe me. He just had to take me there to relive the good old days."   Ethan smiled indulgently. "Who knew a star actress who just got back from overseas would know the area better than I do?"   My parents laughed along with them. My mother praised my sister's memory, while my father said Ethan and my sister had been the boy and girl everyone admired in high school, practically a perfect match. Even their teachers had thought they belonged together.   No one remembered that Aldercrest had been my school too.   Only yesterday, I had told Ethan I wanted to go back to our old school with him before the wedding and revisit the memories we had made there. He had agreed.   But today, he had taken my sister instead.   I sat quietly at the far end of the dining table.   All my life, whenever my sister wanted something, my parents made me give it to her. Pretty dresses, favorite toys, rare chances to travel. My mother always said, "Your sister is better than you. The nice things would only go to waste on you."   I had thought Ethan would be the one person who chose me.   Now even the wedding ring we had picked together had been handed to my sister as if it meant nothing. I had personally chosen that one-of-a-kind design. Its concept was called One and Only.   Being someone's One and Only was what I had spent my whole life chasing, yet never truly had.   This time, I didn't want to give in.   "If I don't have a wedding ring," I said, lifting my head to look calmly at Ethan, "then I'm not getting married."

Seven months into my pregnancy, I threw myself down the stairs, losing our child at a brutal cost. When I regained consciousness, I saw Kenton stride hurriedly into the private ward, barely restraining a blazing fury in his eyes. "I told you to let Mrs. Lowe handle everything! Why couldn't you stay steady for these final months!" It was the first time I had seen him so furious and distraught. So he could lose his composure for someone—but never for me, nor for our child who never made it into the world. "Kenton, did you see our baby? Was it a boy or a girl?" I met his gaze, calling him the way I had when we were children. The fetus suffered from congenital anencephaly, doomed to die upon delivery with no chance of survival. Still, Kenton had instructed the doctors to conceal the truth, falsifying every prenatal screening report to appear normal. His sole motive was to obtain the umbilical cord blood from my child, hoping it might save Serena Cross—the woman he loved.