Julian Vance had thrown my breakfasts into the trash, sold the townhouse where we’d lived for seven years without telling me, and kissed another woman in front of half our college class. Yet none of those things finally broke me. What broke was something inside myself—the part that had spent years begging a man to remember I was human.
Chapter 1
In my first life, I signed the divorce papers the morning after our college reunion.
We never reached the courthouse.
A tractor-trailer crossed the center line on a rain-slick highway, and the last things I remembered were screaming tires, Julian’s hand flying across the console, and white headlights filling the windshield.
Then I opened my eyes.
Music was playing.
Someone was laughing beside me.
A cold glass sat between my fingers.
And I was back at the reunion.
Three years after graduation. One night before I had agreed to divorce Julian. Several hours before the crash that killed us both.
At first, I thought death had left me dreaming.
Then the doors opened.
Julian walked in with Gemma Reed on his arm.
Every conversation in the room changed direction.
Three years earlier, Julian and I had been the couple everyone remembered. He had been brilliant, wealthy, handsome, and ambitious. I had been the medical student who supposedly softened him.
Then we married.
After that, we disappeared from nearly everyone we knew.
My friend Elena leaned close. “Chloe, your husband just walked in with another woman.”
“I noticed.”
“He’s holding her waist.”
“I noticed that too.”
“Aren’t you furious?”
In my first life, I had been.
I remembered sitting at this same table, swallowing tears while Julian kissed Gemma in front of everyone. I remembered going home, crying until dawn, then signing the papers because I finally understood he had been trying to humiliate me into leaving.
This time, I lifted my glass.
“He’ll be my ex-husband tomorrow.”
Elena stared.
Then I smiled.
“Besides, my destination wedding is next month. You’d better come.”
Her mouth fell open.
I almost laughed.
Gemma brought Julian straight to our table, of course. She had always possessed the instincts of someone who could smell an audience.
A classmate tried to rescue the moment by pouring drinks.
When the bottle reached me, Julian spoke without thinking.
“Don’t give her that. She’s allergic to alcohol.”
Silence.
His expression changed immediately.
He had remembered.
After three years of pretending he no longer knew what I liked, feared, ate, or needed, his body had remembered before his pride could stop it.
Gemma recovered first.
“How sweet,” she said. “You still remember everybody’s little quirks.”
Julian drained his whiskey.
I stood. “Excuse me.”
In the restroom, I stared at myself beneath unforgiving fluorescent lights.
I was thirty-two again.
My face had none of the cuts from the accident. My left hand was smooth where shattered glass had sliced it open. Beneath my blouse, my ribs didn’t hurt.
I was alive.
More importantly, I knew what came next.
I knew about the divorce.
The crash.
The years of humiliation that had preceded it.
And this time, I wasn’t walking the same road.
When I stepped into the hallway, Julian was smoking near an exit.
The moment he saw me, he crushed the cigarette beneath his shoe.
That reflex almost hurt more than cruelty.
Once, Julian had never smoked near me because I hated the smell. If he smoked outside, he’d wait before coming indoors.
He had loved me once.
That was what made the rest so difficult to accept.
I walked past.
His hand closed around my wrist.
“Chloe.”
I looked down at his fingers until he released me.
He gave a cold little smile. “You came because you heard I’d be here?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Still angry?”
“Not particularly.”
That answer bothered him more than anger would have.
He leaned against the wall. “I heard you’re working at St. Catherine Medical Center now.”
“I am.”
“An actual job.”
There it was.
For seven years, Julian had called my medical training a hobby whenever he wanted to wound me. When I took time away from residency after my mother’s death and our marriage began collapsing, he called me a parasite.
He had conveniently forgotten that I’d entered medical school before I met him.
“Congratulations,” he continued. “Maybe you’re finally learning to support yourself.”
In my first life, that sentence had reduced me to tears.
Now I looked at him and wondered why I had ever given him that much authority.
Gemma called from the ballroom.
Julian walked away.
I didn’t follow.
The next time I saw him, it was at the hospital.
Vance Capital had donated a substantial package of imaging and surgical equipment, and Julian attended the presentation as the company’s representative.
I was giving a briefing on the gastroenterology research unit when I noticed him staring.
Our medical director had to say his name twice.
“Mr. Vance?”
Julian blinked.
Several people laughed politely.
I continued as though nothing had happened.
Afterward, my department chief intercepted me.
“There’s a donor dinner tonight. You’re attending.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Dr. Hayes, Vance Capital just committed millions. Please.”
So that evening I entered a private dining room determined to sit as far from Julian as possible.
He pulled out the chair beside him.
“Dr. Hayes can sit here.”
Everyone looked at me.
“I’d like her perspective on the department.”
It was a business trap dressed as courtesy.
I sat.
Halfway through dinner, Julian placed a slice of prime rib on my plate.
“You always loved steak.”
I stared at it.
I had never loved steak.
He did.
During our marriage, his tastes had gradually replaced mine. Julian disliked fish, so somehow I stopped eating salmon even though it had been my favorite since childhood. Julian preferred dark furniture, so our house became dark. Julian disliked jazz, so I stopped playing it.
He hadn’t learned me.
He had overwritten me.
His hand suddenly covered mine beneath the table.
I jerked away so violently my chair fell backward.
Every face turned.
“I’m not feeling well,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I left before anyone could stop me.
In the cab, I scrubbed the place he’d touched with a sanitizing wipe until my skin turned red.
An unfamiliar number called when I reached home.
Julian.
“You still have feelings for me,” he said.
I nearly laughed.
“Excuse me?”
“Why else would you react like that?”
“Julian, I’m married.”
His laugh was immediate and cruel.
“To whom?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Chloe, don’t embarrass yourself. Who exactly married you? You couldn’t maintain the lifestyle you wanted without me.”
There was the man I remembered.
I swallowed two antacid tablets and sat on the couch.
“When two adults stop contacting each other, Julian, that’s called being finished.”
“We were married.”
“Not anymore.”
“You never signed—”
“In every way that matters.”
He went silent.
“Don’t call again.”
I hung up.
The following morning, while I was working clinic, my door opened.
Gemma entered with Julian.
She leaned against him theatrically.
“I’ve been dizzy and nauseous.”
I ordered blood work.
An hour later, I read the result.
“You’re pregnant.”
Gemma’s face lit up.
“Julian! We’re having a baby.”
Julian wasn’t looking at her.
He was looking at me.
Then he said, “You can’t keep it.”
Gemma went pale.
“What?”
“Now isn’t the time.”
“Is this because of her?”
“Gemma—”
“You told me you were done with her!”
Then she looked at me.
Something reckless entered her expression.
She lunged across the desk, ripped the chart from my hands, and screamed that I was trying to steal Julian back.
Then she slapped me.
My glasses flew across the room and broke against the tile.
For several seconds, everything rang.
Julian pulled Gemma back.
“Enough. Calm down.”
Not, Are you okay, Chloe?
Not, Gemma, what have you done?
He comforted the woman who had struck me.
So I picked up my broken glasses.
Then I called the police.
At the precinct, Julian tried money first.
“Name your price.”
My cheek throbbed.
“No.”
“Don’t be childish.”
“I’m pressing charges.”
His corporate lawyer arrived twenty minutes later.
Then my department chief called.
“Chloe, settle this. Now.”
“No.”
“You’re jeopardizing the hospital’s relationship with one of our largest donors.”
“I was assaulted while treating a patient.”
“If you force this issue, your position here becomes difficult.”
“Then I resign.”
Before I could hang up, the hospital’s HR director arrived with two administrators. They demanded an apology, threatened disciplinary action, and waved a proposed confidentiality agreement at me.
I sat on a hard precinct bench with a swollen cheek while half a dozen powerful people explained why being assaulted had become my fault.
Then a man’s voice came from behind them.
“Step away from my wife.”
The room went quiet.
Alexander Sterling stood in the doorway.
He was fifty-one, tall, broad-shouldered, and still carried himself like the neurosurgeon he had been before taking over the Sterling Medical Consortium. Two attorneys stood behind him.
His eyes found me.
Then they found the bruise.
Everything in his face changed.
He crossed the room and knelt in front of me.
“Who did this?”
My exhaustion finally caught up with me.
“Alexander.”
His fingers barely touched the uninjured side of my face.
“You were supposed to be in Geneva.”
“I changed flights when you stopped answering.”
Then he stood.
Julian was staring at us.
“Your wife?” he said.
Alexander turned.
The two men looked at one another for the first time.
And I watched Julian Vance realize that while he had been trying to prove I could never survive without him, I had quietly married the one man powerful enough to uncover everything Julian had spent years hiding.
