Chapter 3

The wind whipped across the empty highway, biting through the thin fabric of Eleanor's dress. She wrapped her arms tightly around her waist, shivering uncontrollably.

She looked up and down the road. Nothing. Just endless stretches of dry grass and cracked asphalt.

She pulled her phone from her small clutch. The screen lit up. One bar of signal.

Her fingers trembled as she opened a ride-sharing app. The loading circle spun for ten agonizing seconds before a red banner popped up: No cars available in your area.

The sun was beginning to dip lower in the sky. The shadows stretched long and distorted across the dirt. From the distant woods, a low, guttural howl echoed through the trees.

Panic clawed at her throat.

She couldn't call Alistair. The image of his manic, desperate eyes flashed in her mind. He was gone. He had erased her from his reality the second he heard that voice.

Eleanor opened her contacts. She scrolled past the Montgomery numbers and tapped the only name that meant safety.

Stella Foster.

The line rang. Once. Twice. Static hissed through the earpiece.

"Ellie?" Stella's voice crackled through the phone.

"Stella... it's me." Eleanor's voice broke. A sob tore its way up her throat, raw and humiliating.

"Ellie? What's wrong? Where are you? You sound like you're crying." Stella's tone shifted instantly from casual to fiercely protective.

Eleanor swallowed hard, tasting the dust in the air. "I'm on Route 9. Outside the city. Alistair... he made me get out of the car."

She couldn't say Cordelia's name. Her tongue refused to form the syllables.

"What the hell?!" Stella screamed into the phone. "That bastard left you on the side of the road? Send me your pin.I'll come right away to pick you up."

Eleanor pulled the phone away, shared her location, and put it back to her ear. Her hand was shaking so badly she almost dropped it.

"Stella," Eleanor whispered. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs. "Have you... have you heard anything today? About the Blackwood family?"

She asked the question like she was stepping on a landmine.

The line went dead silent. The static seemed to amplify.

"Ellie," Stella said. Her voice was suddenly very low, very serious. "Take a deep breath. I was going to call you. It's... it's crazy."

Eleanor's lungs stopped working.

"The whole Upper East Side is exploding with it right now," Stella continued, her words rushing out. "Cordelia Blackwood. She's not dead."

The ground beneath Eleanor's feet tilted.

"They're saying she didn't die in that boating accident five years ago," Stella said. "She had amnesia. Some fisherman in a remote village in Europe took her in. She got her memory back a few weeks ago. She secretly flew back to New York a week ago. She's been hiding, watching you."

Every word was a nail being driven into Eleanor's skull.

The phone call in the car. The frantic desperation in Alistair's voice. The way he threw her away like a piece of garbage.

It was all real.

He didn't just abandon her. He abandoned her to run back to his resurrected true love.

"Ellie, are you still there?" Stella asked, her voice tight with worry. "This bitch coming back is bad news. You know how obsessed Alistair was with her. You need to-"

Eleanor couldn't hear the rest. A loud ringing started in her ears, drowning out Stella's voice.

Her fingers went completely numb.

The phone slipped from her grasp. It hit the asphalt with a sharp crack. The glass screen shattered into a spiderweb of jagged lines.

Eleanor stared down at the broken phone.

Five years. Five years of swallowing her pride. Five years of letting Evelyn strip her of her dignity. Five years of trying to warm a man made of ice.

It was all a joke.

She was never his wife. She was just a placeholder. A warm body to keep the seat clean until the real queen returned to claim her throne.

Eleanor's knees gave out.

She collapsed onto the dirt shoulder of the road. She pulled her knees to her chest and buried her face in her arms.

The dam broke. The humiliation, the grief, the sheer, suffocating agony of the last five years ripped out of her chest. She screamed into her knees, her body shaking violently as the tears finally came.

She sat alone in the dirt, crying until her throat bled.