PROLOGUE
"I want something small," I said, tracing the rim of my wine glass. "Just our closest people, maybe a garden somewhere — I do not want a three-hundred-person circus."
Dylan laughed without looking up from his laptop. "Tell that to my mother."
"Your mother will survive."
"My mother has been planning this wedding in her head since 1987. You're asking her to delete thirty-seven years of vision board."
I smiled at that. It was easy to smile in moments like these — him at the kitchen table, me cross-legged on the counter, the city blurring quietly through the window behind him. Seven years. Sometimes I still caught myself surprised that we’d built something this ordinary, this steady. I used to think ordinary was settling. I didn’t anymore.
My phone buzzed
I glanced at it — an unknown number. I almost ignored it. I would have, if the preview hadn’t loaded.
But it did, and what I saw there had my blood chilling to the bones.
A photo.
A woman at a breakfast table, laughing at something off-camera, with two small boys beside her. Maybe four and six. One of them had Dylan’s exact jaw. That sharp, squared-off jaw I’d kissed a thousand times.
My stomach turned before my brain had finished processing.
I opened the message. There were more.
A video, timestamped eight months ago. Dylan is at a backyard birthday party, lifting one of those boys onto his shoulders. The boy was shrieking with laughter. Dylan was grinning — that real grin. The one he only gave when he was completely, genuinely happy.
I thought I was the only one who got that.
“Dylan.”
“Mm.”
“Who is she?”
He looked up. Saw my face first — then the phone in my hand.
Something moved across his expression. Not panic. Not guilt. Something worse — something almost tired. Like this was a conversation he'd been quietly bracing for.
"Maya—"
"Who. Is. She."
He closed his laptop. Set his hands flat on the table.
The wine glass was still in my hand. I became aware of it the way you become aware of your own heartbeat — sudden and uncomfortable.
“Four years.” My voice sounded thin. Wrong. “We’ve been engaged for two.”
"I know."
“You’ve had children for four years and you sat across from me planning seating charts—” My throat tightened, my body starting to shake. “How many times have you flown to Atlanta? How many times did I think you were at a conference? A client dinner?”
"This really isn't about you," he said, and my jaw dropped.
Not just at the words — at the complete lack of emotion on his face.
Void. Like I was interrupting his peace.
It isn’t about me?
“The f**k are you talking about?” I snapped. “Dylan, I have been faithful to you. I turned down a fellowship in Edinburgh because I didn’t want to do long-distance. I have been here—”
“And I love you. That hasn’t changed.”
“Then what is this?” I shook the phone at him. “What is she?”
He leaned back in his chair, looking at me with something almost calm. almost frank, and completely without apology.
“A man like me needs more than one woman, Maya. More than one family. I have the means to provide for all of you. There’s no reason—”
“A man like you.” I set the wine glass down before I threw it at him. “What kind of man is that, exactly? Walk me through it.”
“One who doesn’t believe love has to be a zero-sum game. Come on, you of all people know that all men are polygamous in nature. I’m not even trying to be sneaky about mine. You don’t expect me to be tied to you alone for the rest of my life, do you?”
My mouth fell open as I stared at him, Who was this man?
What had he done to my boyfriend? My fiance?
I took a deep breath, then another…and another.
But they did nothing to calm the storm of anger that was building rapidly inside me.
This has to be a dream.
This has to be a twisted joke.
“You lied to me for seven years.”
He didn’t flinch. That was what broke something in me.
Not the words. Not the confession.
The fact that he felt nothing.
“I want as many children as I can give the world,” he said. “I want to love multiple women well. That’s not something I’m going to apologize for.”
“f**k you!” My chest heaved, each breath burning. “How was I so blind for seven years that I didn’t see this? This—this disgusting side of you?”
My hands shook as I pulled the engagement ring off my finger and threw it at him.
“I hope she knows about me,” I said. “I hope they all do. I hope every woman you’ve ever looked at like that knows exactly who you are.”
Dylan reached for my hand. “Maya, don’t do this. Think about what we’ve—”
I stepped back.
“You’re being dramatic,” he called after me. Still calm. Still so terribly calm.
I didn’t turn around.
The door closed behind me with a quiet click — not a slam, just a click, which somehow felt worse.
I stood there for a second in the hallway of the apartment we’d spent six months choosing, listening to the silence.
The kind of silence that comes when a life collapses without warning.
I made it to the elevator before the first tear fell.
I made it to the parking garage before I broke completely — back against my car, shaking, gasping, furious.
Not for Dylan, I realized. Not even for the years, though they still stung.
I was grieving the version of myself who stood in that kitchen twenty minutes ago, thinking ordinary was enough, that steady was enough, that this—this life—was enough.
That woman was embarrassingly, irreparably gone.
I cried until I couldn't. Then I got in the car, adjusted the mirror, and drove.
No destination. Just away.
At a red light somewhere on the edge of the city, I looked at my bare ring finger on the steering wheel and made a decision — quiet and cold and absolute, the kind that doesn't need to be said out loud because it's already done.
Never again.
Not the vulnerability. Not the planning.
Not the soft stupid willingness to believe that someone loving you means they're for you.
I was thirty-one years old and I was done learning that lesson.
