Chapter 1

My husband of three years, tech mogul Harrison Lang, has severe face blindness. So I became a brand, not a wife, wearing only blue and Chanel No. 5 so he could recognize me.

But at a party in Cannes, I watched him walk through a crowd of hundreds and embrace his mistress, Kassie, with a look of pure joy. He saw her instantly.

Later that night, I was mistakenly arrested. I screamed his name for help.

He looked right at me and told the police, "I don't know her."

He left me to rot in a French jail cell, claiming he didn't recognize me without my "uniform."

But how could he see her in a gold dress, yet not his own wife being dragged away? It wasn't his illness; it was his heart. It had learned her face, but never bothered with mine.

Now, years later, he' s had me arrested again at my own art show. But as the cuffs click shut, an old fire captain steps forward. "I was at the wildfire that caused his condition," he tells the police, looking at Harrison. "And I know the girl who saved his life."

Then, he points directly at me-at the star-shaped scar on my wrist.

Chapter 1

Aliyah POV:

My husband of three years, tech mogul Harrison Lang, is blind. Not in his eyes, but in his mind. He has severe prosopagnosia-face blindness-the result of a childhood trauma I know nothing about. He cannot recognize his own wife.

I found out during our first week of marriage. I came home with a new haircut, a short, chic bob to replace my long waves. He walked right past me in the foyer, his eyes scanning the space as if searching for someone.

"Harrison?" I had said, my voice small.

He turned, a polite but distant smile on his face, the kind he gave to strangers, to his employees. "I'm sorry, have we met? Are you here for a meeting?"

My heart felt like it had been dropped from a great height. "It's me, Harrison. Aliyah."

The recognition didn't click in his eyes. It was the expensive, custom-made dress he' d bought for me, the one I' d been wearing that morning, that finally registered. "Aliyah. Of course. The hair... it threw me off."

He never commented on the haircut again.

After that, I created a uniform. I became a ghost in my own life, defined by two things: the color blue and Chanel No. 5.

Blue was supposedly his favorite color. I wore it every day. Royal blue, navy blue, sky blue. My closet became a monochrome sea of sadness. The scent of Chanel No. 5 clung to me like a second skin, a constant, cloying reminder of my own invisibility. It was my olfactory signature, my auditory cue. When he smelled the perfume, he knew his wife was near.

I was a walking, talking brand. The Aliyah Potts Brand. Simple, consistent, recognizable.

Today was our third wedding anniversary, and we were in a helicopter, flying over the jagged, snow-dusted peaks of the Rockies for a corporate retreat. The wind howled outside, a mournful sound that echoed the emptiness inside my chest.

I touched his arm. "Harrison, look. It's beautiful."

He glanced out the window, his expression unreadable. "It is." He didn't look at me. He never really looked at me.

I held a small, wrapped box in my lap. A custom-made fountain pen, engraved with the coordinates of the place we first met. A place he didn't remember. A gesture he wouldn't understand.

Suddenly, the helicopter lurched violently. An earsplitting screech of metal tore through the air. The pilot shouted something I couldn't understand over the roar of the failing engine.

Panic erupted. The helicopter began to spin, the breathtaking landscape turning into a terrifying, dizzying blur.

My hand flew to Harrison's arm, gripping him tight. "Harrison!" I screamed his name, my one anchor in the chaos.

He looked at me, his eyes wide with fear, but there was no recognition in them. Only terror and confusion.

The helicopter hit the mountainside with a sickening crunch. I was thrown forward, my head smacking against the seat in front of me. The world went black for a second. When my vision cleared, the cabin was a wreck of twisted metal and shattered glass.

Harrison was trying to get the door open. He was alive.

"Harrison," I gasped, reaching for him. Blood was trickling down my temple.

He turned to me, his face a mask of primal fear. He saw me, but he didn't see me. He saw a stranger. A threat.

"Get away from me!" he roared, shoving me back with all his might. My injured head slammed against the bent metal frame of the window. The force of it knocked the air from my lungs.

He saw me as a stranger he needed to get past to survive.

The world swam in and out of focus. I saw him finally pry the door open and scramble out into the snow. He never looked back.

I lay there, bleeding and broken, in the wreckage of a helicopter on our third wedding anniversary, pushed away by the man I married because he thought I was someone else.

The next thing I knew, I was in a hospital bed. The crisp white sheets felt cold against my skin. My head throbbed with a dull, persistent ache. A nurse told me I had a severe concussion and a fractured rib.

I waited. I waited for Harrison. For hours that stretched into a day, then two. My room was silent, sterile. No flowers, no phone calls. Just the rhythmic beep of the heart monitor.

On the third day, I saw him. Not in my room, but on the small television screen mounted on the wall. He was at a press conference, looking impeccable in a tailored suit. His face was composed, powerful.

A reporter asked him how he felt, being the survivor of such a traumatic crash.

Harrison smiled, a brilliant, charismatic flash of white teeth. He raised a glass of champagne. "I feel blessed," he said, his voice smooth and confident. "It's a miracle. We're all just so grateful there were no casualties."

No casualties.

The words hit me harder than the helicopter crash. Harder than his hand shoving me away.

He had forgotten me. Completely. I wasn't a casualty. I wasn't a person. I was just... missing data. An error in his system.

I was discharged a week later. I took a cab back to our sprawling, empty mansion. And I doubled down on my uniform. My blue became brighter, my perfume stronger. I became a caricature of myself, a desperate attempt to be seen, to be remembered.

It didn't work. He' d walk into a room, I' d say his name, and he' d flinch, a flicker of confusion in his eyes before the scent of Chanel hit him and he' d force a smile. "Aliyah. There you are."

I was a ghost haunting the hallways of my own marriage. Maybe I was always meant to be a ghost. Some people are born to be protagonists, the center of their own stories. I was background scenery. A footnote.

The breaking point didn't come with a bang, but with a quiet, soul-crushing certainty. It happened at the Cannes Film Festival. The air was thick with the scent of salt, money, and desperation. Harrison was there to promote a new film his company was financing.

I was wearing my uniform: a custom royal blue gown, my hair styled exactly as it had been for the last year, the air around me saturated with Chanel No. 5. I stood by his side on the red carpet, a perfect, smiling accessory.

Inside the grand ballroom, the party was a chaotic sea of faces, a nightmare for someone with prosopagnosia. Hundreds of people milled about. Yet, I saw Harrison' s eyes scan the crowd, and for the first time in years, I saw them lock onto someone with startling precision.

His whole demeanor changed. The polite, detached mask fell away, replaced by a genuine, breathtaking smile. He moved through the throng with a purpose I had never seen before, heading straight for a woman in a shimmering gold dress.

She was Kassie Crane, a rising influencer, a musician who had built her career on social media.

He reached her, and without a moment's hesitation, he wrapped his arms around her, pulling her into a tight embrace. He buried his face in her hair, and even from across the room, I could see the look of pure, unadulterated joy on his face.

He had found her. In a crowd of hundreds, he had found her. A woman not wearing blue. A woman who probably smelled of her own unique perfume. A woman who was not his wife.

The floor beneath my feet seemed to fall away. It wasn't a sickness. It wasn't a flaw in his brain. It was a choice. A choice of the heart. His heart had learned her face. It had never bothered to learn mine.

I felt a sudden, desperate need for air. I stumbled out of the ballroom and onto a deserted balcony overlooking the Mediterranean. The cool night air did nothing to soothe the fire in my chest.

As I stood there, my world crumbling, two French police officers approached me. They spoke in rapid French, their tone harsh. I caught the words "voleuse de bijoux"-jewel thief.

They thought I was someone else. A notorious thief who apparently bore a resemblance to me. They grabbed my arms.

Panic seized me. "No, you have the wrong person! Je ne suis pas elle!"

They ignored my protests, their grips tightening. Through the glass doors, I saw Harrison. He was still talking to Kassie, laughing.

"Harrison!" I screamed, my voice raw with terror. "Harrison, help me!"

He turned. His eyes met mine across the crowded space. He saw the police officers holding me. He saw the terror on my face.

And then he glanced at me, a flicker of annoyance, and turned to the officers. His voice was cold, dismissive, and carried across the room with perfect clarity.

"Je ne la connais pas."

I don't know her.

The words echoed the ones he spoke in the helicopter, but this time they were a death sentence.

My world went silent. The officers dragged me away, my pleas swallowed by the party music.

The next twenty-four hours were a blur of a cold interrogation room, the stench of stale cigarettes, and the crushing weight of being utterly alone in a foreign country. My embassy was eventually contacted. My identity was confirmed. The real thief had been apprehended at the airport. I was released with a clipped, unapologetic "désolé."

I walked out of the police station into the bright Cannes morning, feeling like I had aged a hundred years. My phone had been returned to me. There were no missed calls from Harrison. No texts.

A sleek black car pulled up. Harrison's assistant, a man I barely knew, got out. He didn't ask if I was okay. He didn't offer a word of comfort.

He handed me a garment bag. "Mr. Lang was very upset," the assistant said, his tone accusatory. "He said you know the rules. You are to wear your uniform. He has a press junket this afternoon and needs you by his side."

I opened the bag. Inside was another blue dress. Identical to the one I'd been wearing.

The last bit of warmth in my soul fizzled out and died. I had been arrested, humiliated, and abandoned, and my husband's only concern was that I had broken protocol. That I wasn't wearing the correct costume.

When I finally saw him back at the hotel suite, he was pacing, his jaw tight. "Where the hell have you been, Aliyah? And what were you wearing last night? I told you, blue. Only blue. Is that so hard to understand?"

The rage that had been simmering inside me finally boiled over. "They arrested me, Harrison! I was in jail! I screamed for you, and you told them you didn't know me!"

"I didn't recognize you," he said, his voice flat. "You weren't wearing blue. How was I supposed to know it was you?"

"But you recognized Kassie Crane," I choked out, the name tasting like poison. "In a gold dress. In the middle of a hundred people. You walked right up to her. You hugged her."

For the first time, a flicker of something-guilt? panic?-crossed his face. It was gone in an instant. "I... I thought she was you," he lied, the words clumsy and hollow. "The lighting was strange. I got confused."

A lie. A pathetic, insulting lie. She looked nothing like me. She wasn't wearing my uniform. She wasn't me. But his heart knew her.

I looked at him, really looked at him, and saw a stranger. A man who had built our entire marriage on a foundation of willful ignorance. My pain was an inconvenience. My identity was a burden.

"You're right," I said, my voice suddenly calm, eerily so. "You got confused."

I walked into the bedroom and saw a magazine on the nightstand. Kassie Crane was on the cover, a close-up shot of her laughing face. Harrison's thumbprint was smudged on the glossy paper, right over her cheek.

He could recognize a blurry, two-dimensional image of her. But he couldn't recognize the woman who slept in his bed every night.

I picked up my phone. I had the number for a reporter at a major magazine, a woman who had been trying to get a tell-all interview for years.

I scrolled to her contact.

"You know what, Harrison?" I said, my voice light, almost cheerful. "I think I will change. I'm tired of blue."

He looked relieved. "Good. Put on the dress the assistant brought. We're late."

I smiled, a real smile this time, but it didn't reach my eyes. I pressed the call button. The reporter picked up on the first ring.

"This is Aliyah Potts," I said, my voice clear and steady, my eyes locked on my husband' s clueless face. "I'm ready to talk."

It was over. The three years of trying to be seen, of pouring myself into a mold that didn' t fit, of slowly erasing myself. It was all over.