Eight years ago, at his coming-of-age party, he'd gotten drunk and punched a classmate who was pressuring me to drink and making crude jokes at my expense.
Now the person on the receiving end of that hateful glare was me.
I was used to it by now.
We'd grown up together for twelve years. He'd always known he was supposed to marry me. But after he took that bet with his friends—lived as a nobody, fell in love with the tough, kindhearted Alice Frost—and his mother used their family's expectations to force them apart, everything changed.
He was convinced I'd poisoned his mother's mind. That I was the reason he couldn't be with the woman he loved. His contempt for me turned savage.
Ruining my family wasn't enough to satisfy him. At every single step of the wedding preparations—dress fittings, guest lists—he found ways to humiliate me. Small things, like refusing to look at me. Big things, like showing up with a different woman on his arm and getting handsy with her right in front of everyone.
In the beginning, I screamed at him. Demanded to know why we couldn't just call off the engagement like civilized people and let me keep a shred of dignity. But eventually, I turned into something pathetic—a lovesick fool who'd do anything, no matter how degrading, just to beg for a sliver of his time.
The last straw was when I stood in a downpour to deliver condoms to him and whatever woman he'd brought around just to disgust me—all because I'd been trying to get him to show up for a wedding menu tasting.
Everyone assumed I was just hopelessly, helplessly in love with him.
The truth was different. The time before that, at the engagement ring fitting, he'd decided to humiliate me by turning my family's bankruptcy into a punchline—telling the whole room like it was a funny story, just to watch my face crumble. I snapped. I contacted the tabloids and leaked the story about how he'd hidden his identity and played with someone's feelings.
The fallout hit his family hard. Public backlash. Stock prices in free fall.
Christine, who'd been turning a blind eye to everything until then, called me with a warning: pull something like that again, and I could forget about the fifty million dollars we'd agreed on.
That was the moment I finally saw myself clearly.
I wasn't some important character holding a childhood-sweetheart script.