Chapter 3

In the sterile quiet of the Sterling mansion, my mind kept drifting back to college.

Liam and I were in the same graduating class, but we might as well have been on different planets. He was the silent genius in the back of the lecture hall, the one professors treated with a special kind of reverence. He never spoke to anyone, just absorbed information with an unnerving intensity. He was always surrounded by an invisible wall of money and intellect.

I was the scholarship kid. The one who worked two jobs, who wore the same coat for three winters, who sketched on napkins because I couldn't always afford new paper. I was a target. Rumors followed me like a shadow. People said I was only at the prestigious art school to find a rich husband. They whispered when I walked by, their eyes filled with a mix of pity and scorn.

I learned to ignore it. I built walls of my own, made of pride and a desperate need to prove them all wrong. I never looked at boys like Liam Sterling. They were not for me. They were a reminder of the gap between my world and theirs, a gap I could never hope to cross.

Now, I was living in his house. The irony was not lost on me.

Our days fell into a strange, silent routine. Liam would be gone before I woke up, off to his tech empire. He would return late at night, long after I had eaten the solitary dinner prepared for me by a silent cook. We were two ghosts haunting the same space.

Sometimes our paths would cross in a hallway. He would give me a brief, unreadable glance and continue on his way. I learned his habits. He only drank sparkling water from a specific Norwegian brand. He demanded absolute silence when he was in his study, which was most of the time he was home. The entire house seemed to hold its breath around him.

The opulence was suffocating. I had everything I could materially want. The finest food, the softest clothes, a library of art books I could only have dreamed of. But I was desperately lonely.

The nights were the worst.

The nightmares started again. Not about Liam or this strange new life. They were old nightmares, dredged up from the depths of my past. I was a child again, watching my parents fight. The screaming, the sound of breaking glass. My father, leaving for the last time. My mother, sinking into a depression she never came out of, leaving me with my grandmother. The constant fear of not having enough money for food, for rent, for medicine.

I would wake up gasping, my body slick with cold sweat. The silk sheets felt like a trap. I'd sit up in the massive bed, staring into the darkness of the unfamiliar room, and the feeling of being an imposter, a fraud, would wash over me. I didn't belong here. I was just a girl from a broken home who had made a desperate choice. And no amount of money or marble bathrooms could change that.