Chapter 1

The day our son, Leo, was born was the day my life savings vanished.

Fifty thousand dollars.

Every penny I had scraped together since aging out of the foster system. It was my dream, tangible and real, the down payment for a small house with a yard, a home I never had.

Ethan, my boyfriend and Leo' s father, held my hand in the stark white hospital room, his eyes, the color of a summer sky, filled with what I thought was sincerity. He was a struggling artist, or so he told me, his genius unrecognized, his pockets always empty. I loved him for it, for his supposed soul, not his wallet.

"Stella, this is it," he' d whispered, his voice urgent, just hours after I' d given birth. "The residency in Europe. It' s our one shot. With this, I can finally support you and Leo. We can have everything we ever wanted."

He painted a picture of a future so bright it blinded me to the present. He framed my life savings not as a loss, but as an investment in us. My dream of a house could wait, he' d said, because our family' s security couldn' t.

So I did it. Exhausted from labor, flooded with hormones and a naive, boundless love for this man and our new baby, I transferred the entire fifty thousand dollars to him. My nest egg, my security, my one tangible piece of stability, gone in a single click.

Weeks later, the bright future he' d painted dissolved into a nightmare.

Leo wasn' t just a fussy baby. A doctor with a kind but grave face sat us down in a small, sterile office. He used words I didn' t understand, words like "rare genetic disorder" and "experimental treatment."

Then he used a number I understood all too well.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

My breath left my body. The room tilted. I looked at Ethan, my partner, the man who held our future in his hands.

"The money," I said, my voice a raw, desperate croak. "Ethan, the residency. We need the money back. Now."

He stared at me, his handsome face twisting into something ugly, something I' d never seen before. Contempt.

"The money' s gone, Stella," he said, his tone flat and cold. "It' s all invested."

"Invested in what? Get it back!" I was almost screaming now, panic clawing up my throat.

He actually scoffed, a short, sharp, dismissive sound.

"You don' t get it, do you? It' s gone. Are you trying to trap me? Is this what this is all about? The moment the baby has a problem, you try to tie me down financially." He pulled out his wallet and threw it on the table between us. "Look. I have less than five hundred dollars to my name. What more do you want from me?"

The doctor looked away, embarrassed. But I couldn' t look away. I just stared at Ethan, at the stranger sitting across from me, and felt the floor of my world drop out from under me.