Chapter 3

The rage came after the sickness passed. It was a cold, quiet fury that settled deep in her bones. She didn't scream, she didn't cry. She walked into the living room, to the bookshelf that held their memories. She pulled out their wedding album, the heavy leather cover embossed with their names and the date that now meant nothing.

She took it to the kitchen counter and found the sharpest pair of scissors in the drawer. Methodically, she opened the album to the first page. A photo of her and Ethan, laughing as they ran out of the church through a shower of rice. With precise, steady hands, she cut her own smiling face out of the picture, leaving a gaping, white hole next to her husband. She turned the page. Them cutting the cake. Snip. Her face was gone. Their first dance. Snip. Another empty space.

She went through the entire album, page by page, photo by photo, meticulously erasing herself from their history. It was a destructive, deeply satisfying act. If he wanted to erase her from his life, she would help him. When she was done, a small pile of smiling paper faces lay on the counter like confetti from a funeral.

Later, while scrolling through her phone with a deadened thumb, she saw it. Scarlett had posted a new photo on Instagram. She was at a trendy art gallery, a glass of champagne in her hand, smiling smugly at the camera. She looked radiant, successful, and predatory. The caption read: Good things come to those who wait. The post was only an hour old, and it already had hundreds oflikes. The veiled triumph in her words was so obvious, so nauseatingly clear to Ava, that she had to put her phone down before she threw it against the wall.

Ethan came home a few hours later. He found her in the kitchen, staring at the pile of cutout faces. He saw the mutilated wedding album on the counter.

"What did you do?" he asked, his voice a low growl.

"I'm just tidying up," Ava said, her voice eerily calm. "Getting rid of things we don't need anymore." She looked up at him, her eyes locking onto his. "Like that lipstick on your collar last night. Did you get rid of that too?"

He flinched, a flicker of something-guilt? surprise?-in his eyes. He didn't deny it. He didn't have to. His silence was a confession.

"She's just a friend, Ava," he said, the words sounding hollow and absurd. "She's worried about me. About us."

"Is she?" Ava said, a bitter laugh escaping her lips. "She seems to be handling the tragedy just fine."

He had no answer for that. The tension between them was a thick, unbreathable fog.

The next day, Ava was working from her home office, trying to lose herself in the clean, logical lines of a new building design, when she heard voices from the garden. She went to the window. Ethan was on the phone, pacing back and forth near the rose bushes she had planted their first year in the house. His back was to her, but his voice carried on the still afternoon air.

She couldn't hear the other side of the conversation, but she could hear him. "I know, I know... soon. We just have to get through this... a few more weeks, and it will all be finalized... a fresh start."

There was a pause. He laughed, a soft, intimate sound that made her stomach clench.

"Of course, I want to go to Norway. See my parents, get away from all this... just you and me."

Norway. His parents. Just you and me. The words echoed in her head. He wasn't talking to his mother. He wasn't talking to a lawyer. He was talking to Scarlett. He was planning a future with her, a future built on the ruins of their marriage. And Scarlett, the puppet master, was so sure of her victory that she was discussing their escape plan in broad daylight.

Ava backed away from the window, a cold clarity washing over her. The grief was still there, a massive, aching hole in her chest, but it was now joined by something else. A steely resolve. They thought she was a fool. They thought she was a weak, heartbroken wife who would just crumble and disappear. They had underestimated her.

She went back to her desk, but she didn't look at the blueprints. She opened a new, blank document on her computer. At the top, she typed a single word: Plan. They had started a war, but she was going to be the one to finish it. She would not be erased. She would not be replaced. She would take everything they had tried to steal from her and burn their world to the ground with the truth.