The first time another woman told me my husband still belonged to her, she was wearing a necklace worth more than my flower shop.

When we arrived at SoHo, the front windows of Wild June were shattered across the pavement. Shards of glass glinted under the red and blue strobes of two NYPD patrol cruisers.

“Ma'am, stay back,” an officer ordered as I rushed forward.

“It's my shop! It's mine!”

I pushed past the yellow tape, Ethan right behind me.

The interior was decimated. Coolers were smashed, centuries-old ceramic vases ground into powder, and hundreds of fresh orchids and peonies trampled into a soggy, ruined mulch on the hardwood floor. Spray-painted across the back brick wall in harsh black lettering was a single word:

*DIVORCE.*

I fell to my knees in the center of the wreckage, my hands plunging into the destroyed soil of my mother’s favorite hydrangeas. Everything she had left me—every hour of sweat, every dream I had built while trying to survive her loss—had been crushed in a matter of minutes.

“Claire,” Ethan knelt beside me, pulling me up by my shoulders. “Don’t touch the glass. Claire, look at me.”

“It’s gone,” I choked out, a sob finally breaking through my throat. “She destroyed it. Or your father did. It doesn’t matter which one—they did this because of me!”

“They did this because of *me*,” Ethan corrected, his voice terrifyingly calm. But when I looked at his face, his eyes burned with an icy, lethal stillness that frightened me more than the vandalism. “They think this will frighten you into filing for an annulment. They think if you leave, the trust revokes my voting shares tomorrow morning at the emergency board summit.”

He took off his overcoat and wrapped it around my trembling shoulders, pulling me against his chest right in front of the flashing cameras of the arriving paparazzi.

He didn't care about the press. He didn't care about appearances.

“I won't let them break you, Claire,” he whispered into my hair. “I swear on my life.”

A black town car pulled up across the street. The rear window rolled down slowly.

Sitting in the back seat was Victoria Ashford, holding a cigarette, watching the ruins of my life with a cool, detached smirk. Beside her sat Richard Whitmore—Ethan’s father—his cold gray eyes fixed squarely on his son.

Richard tapped the glass, and the driver pulled away, vanishing into the Manhattan rain.

Ethan watched them disappear. When he looked back at me, his jaw was set like forged steel.

“Tomorrow morning is the shareholder vote,” Ethan said, wiping a tear from my cheek with his thumb. “My father thinks he's going to strip me of the CEO position and force a merger with a European consortium that will dismantle the company.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked through chattering teeth.