Introduction

I was a struggling musician in Brooklyn, barely making ends meet.

Then I found Vic, an amnesiac girl with wide, scared eyes, and my world changed.

We shared instant noodles and cheap wine, her laughter filling my cramped studio.

She believed in my music, even when I didn't, and her gift of my grandmother' s vintage guitar pick became a symbol of our pure, impossible love.

But then, Vic remembered her past.

She transformed into Victoria Ashford, a cold, sharp heiress, returning to her glittering world.

The woman who once fussed over my paper cuts now looked at me with polite indifference.

Our profound connection was replaced by her mother' s demands and Spencer Hayes, her new, polished fiancé.

I became her humiliation, a relic from a life she disavowed.

At a lavish gala, she dismissed my pain when Spencer' s friends deliberately crushed my guitar hand.

The hand I needed for every note, every chord, now irrevocably damaged.

My music, my livelihood, my very soul, was shattered as she stood by, unmoving.

How could the girl who understood my deepest dreams become this calculating stranger?

How could she watch my life' s passion be destroyed without a flicker of remorse?

The truth was colder than any winter: she saw my suffering as mere inconvenience.

Then, her mother offered me a million dollars to disappear.

A breakup fee for a love she never recognized.

I took it, not as defeat, but as the only way to escape the golden cage and rebuild.

I left, determined to forge a new path, far from the echoes of what we once were.