Chapter 2

The woman apologized without sounding sorry in the slightest. Instead, she stuck out her tongue at Nolan playfully.

“Morning, Mr. Big Shot! Your personal assistant is reporting for duty!”

It was Lila Caldwell.

For a second, my mind went completely blank.

I looked at Nolan and fought to keep the humiliation from making my voice shake.

“Nolan Blackwood, you said you could explain everything else. What about this? How are you going to explain her?”

“So this is what you meant by blacklisting her—putting her on your payroll?”

I had once been naive enough to believe Nolan was the only light left in my life.

When my mother was driven to her death, when grief cost me my baby, and when even my own father sided with his mistress’s daughter and told me to stop making trouble, Nolan—the man who had once fought me at every turn—was the one who stood up for me.

He forced Bryce to his knees before me and made him confess what he had done, begging both me and the baby I had lost for forgiveness again and again.

He also threw hundreds of millions of dollars into destroying Lila’s entertainment career when she was at the height of her fame, driving her out of New York City and sending her and her home-wrecking mother slinking back to their hometown.

Then he stayed beside me through three years of severe depression, slowly putting the broken pieces of me back together.

“If all of that was a lie, what was real?”

The words came out barely above a whisper. The physical symptoms I had thought were gone came crashing back, and my entire body began to shake uncontrollably.

“Don’t do this, Audrey. Please calm down. I didn’t lie to you. It was all real!”

Nolan stepped forward and gripped my shoulders.

He understood my episodes better than anyone.

But now, that knowledge had become the sharpest blade in my heart.

I stared up at the face that had somehow become unfamiliar despite how well I knew it, my nails digging into his arms.

“Nolan Blackwood, after everything I just heard, you’re still going to lie to me?”

“I’m not lying.”

Nolan made no move to pull away, his anxious gaze fixed on my stomach.

“Audrey, this isn’t what you think.”

But I was no longer the foolish woman who believed him without question.

I shoved him away and pointed at Lila.

“Then prove it! If I’m wrong, prove you never lied to me and fire her!”

I knew firing her would prove nothing.

A lie would still be a lie.

But if I didn’t let the rage out, I felt as if I would stop breathing.

The man who had promised to protect me forever chose her over me for the first time.

“I’m sorry, Audrey. I can’t do that. Lila is innocent.”

“Lila? Innocent?”

A broken laugh escaped me.

Seeing that I was on the verge of falling apart, Nolan finally sighed.

“I only stepped in for you back then because I mistook you for the girl who saved me. You weren’t her.”

“Twenty-five years ago, before the Blackwood family acknowledged me, I nearly starved to death on the streets.”

“A little girl wearing a red hair ribbon gave me three peanut-butter cookies.”

“That little girl was Lila.”

The details struck me all at once: twenty-five years ago, a red hair ribbon, a snowy street, and three peanut-butter cookies.

My mind flashed back to that night in the middle of a blizzard, and I closed my eyes against the pain.

“Nolan, what if I told you that little girl was me?”