He Said No, She Found Love

The last thing I remembered was the cold.

It was the kind of cold that seeped into your bones, mocking the thin dress you wore.

I was dying in a dark, abandoned warehouse, our son Leo trembling beside me.

Then, his voice.

Over the kidnapper' s phone, Harrison Hayes, the man I' d loved for years, flatly declared: "Wrong number. I don' t know them."

He didn' t know me.

He didn' t know Leo.

Five years of a miserable marriage dissolved into one brutal truth: he resented me, seeing my existence as the ruin of his life.

My death, simply a convenient erasure.

And then, nothing.