
For three years, everyone treated me as Julian Sterling's grieving fiancée. Julian, the dead heir. Julian, the man I had supposedly lost. I had spent those same years married to his older brother, Alexander. Then I learned Julian had faked his death so he could run off with another woman. I stopped covering his bills, his scandals, and the connections that kept his name respectable. Julian had left me to guard his reputation while he enjoyed the life he claimed to have lost. He expected the arrangement to be waiting for him when he came back. His new fiancée called my pink diamond ring a knockoff. She even invited me to their engagement party so she could humiliate me in public. Tonight, she raises her heel over that ring. Alexander is already on his way.

The photograph surfaced on a gossip site at seven in the morning. By seven-fifteen, my phone was a wall of notifications, and by seven-thirty I had read the caption six times. *Julian Sterling, the heir who drowned off Nice three years ago, is alive — and engaged.* The picture showed him on a yacht, laughing with his head thrown back, a woman in a white dress tucked under his arm. The caption named her Mia Vance. Julian looked exactly as he had the summer he died: sun-browned, easy, holding champagne like it had missed him. I stood in the kitchen of the hilltop estate and read it again. For three years, I had been the public's favorite mourner. Julian's grieving fiancée. The girl who wore black to every gala and kept his name out of every scandal. I had organized the charity events tha
