Chapter 3

The first time I saw Ethan, he was getting his preppy ass handed to him.

A couple of local toughs in my old neighborhood cornered him outside a bodega. He looked like a startled deer, all clean-cut college kid in a place he clearly didn't belong.

I was on my vintage Norton, leather jacket, ripped jeans. Not exactly his type. Or so I thought.

I revved the engine, pulled up beside them. "Problem, gentlemen?"

They took one look at me, probably decided I was crazier than they were, and scattered.

Ethan just stared, mouth slightly open.

"You lost?" I asked.

He stammered something about a shortcut.

That was how it started. A whirlwind. Him, the golden boy from the wealthy family, defying them all for the girl from the wrong side of the tracks.

We lived in a tiny, run-down apartment in Brooklyn. Ethan was trying to make it on his own, outside his family' s prestigious architectural firm.

Money was tight. Really tight.

I remembered one week, I' d pulled so many extra shifts at the clinic, I was walking in my sleep.

He came home one evening, looking sheepish. He held out a single, cheap, pink carnation.

"It's not much," he'd said, his eyes sincere. "But I wanted to get you something."

I' d pressed it into an old medical textbook. It was still there, faded and brittle, a reminder of a time when love felt real, not like a transaction.

A time before the penthouse, before Chloe, before the silence grew so loud it deafened us both.

Now, I found a small rental in a different part of Brooklyn. Diverse, noisy, alive.

The kind of place I grew up in.

I found a therapist. Dr. Ramirez. She didn't wear pearls or judge my scuffed boots.

We talked about grief. About insomnia. About a marriage that had become a gilded cage.

It was a start.