Shattered crown

Chapter One

The Last Night I Was Hers

I was twenty-six the night everything I loved became a lie.

It was raining in London. Of course it was raining. In my memory it is always raining on the moments that matter the night my father left, the night I got my first commission, the night I realised that the man I was going to marry had been sleeping with my best friend for fourteen months.

I remember the exact sound the door made when I pushed it open. A soft click. The kind of sound that means nothing. The kind of sound that unmakes a life.

I hadn't meant to come home early. The client meeting in Mayfair had ended two hours ahead of schedule, and I was so pleased I kept thinking about how I'd tell Dominic, how he'd pull me into his chest and say something low and warm into my hair the way he always did. I was smiling when I turned the key. I was actually smiling.

The flat was dim. One lamp in the bedroom. And then I heard her laugh that soft, practiced laugh I had known since university and everything in my body went cold before my brain caught up.

I stood in the hallway for seven seconds. I counted. I counted because counting was the only thing keeping me from making a sound.

Then I walked back out.

I didn't confront them. People always want to know why I didn't confront them, as though there was something to be gained from it. There wasn't. I already knew. Some part of me had already known for weeks the way Celeste had started asking too many questions about my schedule, the way Dominic had begun holding me like he was practicing something. Like affection had become a performance he needed to keep sharp.

I took my phone from my coat pocket and sat on the cold stone steps outside our building and stared at the rain.

My hands were not shaking. That was the worst part. I had always imagined I would shake. I had always imagined that real pain would announce itself violently, make me fall apart in ways that people could see and name and respond to. But it didn't. It settled in quietly, like a cold that comes in the night and is already a fever by morning.

I called Marcus.

“Aria.” He picked up on the second ring. He always picked up on the second ring. “It’s half ten. Why are you..”

"I need somewhere to sleep tonight."

Silence. Marcus had been my business partner for three years. He knew me in the way that only someone who has watched you negotiate impossible deadlines and cry into takeaway containers can know you. He heard something in those seven words that I couldn't say out loud yet.

"I'll leave the key under the mat,"

he said, and that was all.

I went to the bathroom first. Our bathroom the one with the cracked tile by the basin that Dominic kept promising to fix. I had a box under the sink. I'd bought it four days ago and hadn't brought myself to open it yet, because opening it would make it real, and I was so afraid of real things then.

I did the test standing up. I didn't sit on the edge of the tub the way people do in films. I just stood there, one hand on the basin, and watched the lines appear.

Two lines.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a very long time. The woman looking back at me did not look destroyed. She looked decided.

You're going to be fine,

I told her.

You're going to be more than fine.

I took the test with me. I did not take the engagement ring.

I left it on the bathroom counter that gorgeous, too-large diamond he'd slid onto my finger eight months ago in front of his entire family, the one that had made his mother weep and made me believe that I was someone's forever. I left it there and I walked out of that flat and I did not look back, because I knew that if I looked back, I would find a reason to stay. And staying would have killed something in me that I wasn't willing to lose.

On the steps of Marcus's flat in Shoreditch, I sat in the rain and I booked a one-way flight to New York.

I had six hundred and forty pounds in my personal account. I had a portfolio. I had a baby the size of a poppy seed and a spine I hadn't known I possessed until that moment.

I told myself it was enough.

For a long time, I told myself that every day.

That was five years ago.

I know this because Isla turned five last month, and she asked for a cake shaped like the Manhattan skyline, and I spent three hours the night before bent over fondant and cocktail sticks, laughing at myself, at the absurdity of it, at how completely and utterly this small human had rearranged the furniture of my soul.

She has my nose. She has my stubbornness. She has grey eyes that I do not look at too long when I am tired, because when I am tired, my defenses are down and I see him in them, and that is a door I have spent five years learning to keep shut.

New York taught me things London never could. It taught me that reinvention is not a luxury. It is a survival mechanism dressed up as ambition. I arrived with nothing and I built Voss Studio from a studio apartment in Brooklyn, from late nights and early mornings, from pitches no one believed in until suddenly everyone did.

I am good at what I do. I know that now without apology.

I was always good. I just needed to stop being in a room with someone who made me feel like I had to be grateful for being allowed to be.

Isla is at school. Marcus is on his second coffee. The city is doing what it always does, being loud and indifferent and full of possibility and today, at nine forty-five in the morning, I am going to walk into the Ashworth Group's midtown offices and present the pitch that could make Voss Studio untouchable.

I check my reflection in the cab window. Dark blazer. Hair back. Lipstick the colour of something that doesn't apologise.

I do not know, yet, what is waiting for me in that boardroom.

I do not know that I am about to walk back into the ruin of everything I survived.

I do not know that my past is sitting at the head of that table, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his eyes the exact grey of my daughter's.

Go get it,

I tell my reflection.

She lifts her chin. She always does.