Chapter 1

Robert Vance, my husband, was a celebrated architect. To the world, he built monuments of glass and steel. To me, he built a cage. We had been married for ten years, a decade I spent as the perfect homemaker, the silent supporter behind the great man. Our life was a carefully constructed facade, and I was its chief caretaker.

He was also a serial philanderer.

I knew about most of them. Number ninety-nine, as I privately called her, was different. Her name was Liam, a young artist with wide, ambitious eyes. She wasn' t just a secret affair. Robert moved her into our guest house.

That was the first crack in the facade.

The real break came in the garden. My rose garden. It was the only part of the estate that was truly mine. Each bush was a memory of the children we lost, two babies who never took their first breath. The garden was my sanctuary, a quiet memorial built from love and grief.

One afternoon, I looked out the window and saw Liam there. She was directing two gardeners, pointing at my prize-winning white roses. They had shovels. They were digging them up.

My breath caught in my chest. I walked out, my gait uneven. A car accident years ago, the one that took our second child and left me with a permanent limp, made it hard to hurry. By the time I reached them, a half-dozen of my most cherished bushes were already uprooted, their roots exposed to the air like raw nerves.

Liam turned to me, a sweet, manufactured smile on her face.

"Eleanor, darling. Robert said I could redesign this space. I' m thinking a modern sculpture garden. Roses are so... dated, don' t you think?"

Her voice was light, but her eyes were hard. She was dismantling my life piece by piece, and she was enjoying it.

The pain was a physical thing, a heavy weight pressing down on me. For ten years, I had endured the public whispers, the pitying looks at charity galas, the newspaper photos of Robert with yet another woman on his arm. I had smiled, held my head high, and played my part. I had sacrificed my career, my friends, and my body for this man and this marriage.

I had accepted his disrespect, his blatant infidelity, his coldness. But this, this was an attack on my grief. It was an desecration.

"These are my roses," I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Liam laughed, a sound like glass shattering.

"They' re just plants. Robert said this whole house is his to do with as he pleases. And what pleases him, pleases me."

She turned back to the gardeners. "Get rid of all of them."

Something inside me snapped. The years of silence, of swallowing my pain, of making myself small to accommodate his enormous ego-it all came rushing to the surface. I walked over to the oldest rose bush, the one I planted for our first son, and stood in front of it.

"Stop," I said. My voice was louder now, firm.

The gardeners looked from me to Liam, confused.

"Eleanor, don' t make a scene," Liam said, her smile gone.

"Get out of my garden," I said.

I looked directly at her, and for the first time in a long time, I didn't feel weak or pathetic. I felt a cold, clear anger.

That evening, I confronted Robert in his study. He was sketching at his large oak desk, the very picture of a creative genius at work. He didn' t look up when I came in.

"Robert, we need to talk."

"I' m busy, Eleanor."

"Liam is digging up my rose garden."

He finally looked up, his expression one of annoyance. "I told her she could. It' s a patch of dirt, Eleanor. Get over it."

"It' s not just a patch of dirt to me, and you know it. Those roses... they were for the boys."

His face hardened. "Don' t bring them into this. That was a long time ago. Life moves on. I' m moving on."

I stared at him, at this man I had loved with every fiber of my being. I had stood by him, supported his dreams, managed his home, and raised his public profile, all while nursing my own private heartbreak. I sacrificed everything. And for what? To be told to "get over" the memory of my dead children.

He saw the look on my face and sighed, a show of feigned patience. "Look, Liam is an artist. She needs a space to express herself. It will be good for her, and good for me."

"And what about me, Robert? What is good for me?"

He stood up and walked over to the bar to pour himself a drink. He didn't offer me one.

"You have everything a woman could want, Eleanor. This house, the money, the status. Isn' t that enough?"

I looked at his back, at the confident set of his shoulders. He truly believed it. He believed that his fortune was a fair trade for my soul. He had taken my love, my loyalty, my sacrifices, and trampled them underfoot. For years, I had been a silent partner in my own destruction.

No more.

In that moment, I realized my love for him was finally dead. It hadn't been killed by the 99 affairs. It was killed by his casual dismissal of our shared sorrow, by him giving the one sacred space I had to his new mistress.

He had a secret life. Now, it was time for me to start one of my own. I would reclaim my life, my dignity, and my legacy. The fight would be public, it would be messy, and it would destroy the perfect image he had so carefully crafted.

And I would enjoy every minute of it.