Drama

I was the proudest kept woman in Chicago, and Adrian Sterling, the most powerful heir in the city, treated me like a queen.
Then a broke college girl with a sob story walked into his life.
He brought her to his grandfather's birthday dinner and ordered me to apologize to her in front of everyone.
I took off the nine-figure pink diamond he'd given me and handed it to her.
He froze my cards. He took...

For seven years, Claire Sutton played the perfect daughter, sister, and fiancée—because a voice in her head promised her $100 million and a ticket home if she could make her family love her.
She cooked. She apologized. She sanded down every edge they hated. She got all three of them to 99%.
Then Vanessa—the girl the Suttons raised in her place—came home. Three days later, every score was zero.
So ...

I tried twenty times to finalize my betrothal with Caius for our overseas fellowship, but accidents kept hurting me. I thought it was fate’s test—until I heard him admit he planned it all. He wanted another girl, using my pain to make me quit, all to keep his reputation clean. Now awake, I ended this lie for good.

The day before Thanksgiving, my husband, David, dragged his suitcase to the airport, claiming he was flying to Seattle to meet an important client.
My parents took my younger brother to Miami for a vacation and conveniently took my six-year-old daughter with them.
With the house empty, I picked up a last-minute catering shift that paid double the usual hourly rate. I needed the extra money to cove...

"Ms. Hayes, Avery got into a fight in the art studio. She hit the son of our biggest sponsor. You need to come here right away."
I immediately dropped the landscape plans I was working on and rushed to the arts center.
When I pushed open the office door, two children were standing side by side against the wall.
A man in a perfectly tailored designer suit stood with his back to me, his posture stra...

Three days after I lost our baby, my husband finally remembered to call.

I was packing when Adrian Whitmore's name appeared on my screen.

"Vanessa told me you caused another scene over the medical bills," he said, sounding irritated. "I've authorized the payment. Can we please move on?"

I stared at the tiny knitted sweater lying in my suitcase.

I'd bought it the day I learned I was pregnant.

...

My boyfriend, Ethan Whitmore, has prosopagnosia. He can't remember faces unless he's looking right at them.
At our wedding send-off dinner, my roommate blindfolded him and challenged him to name three things about the woman he'd loved for four years.
"Big eyes. Small face," he said.
My heart nearly burst with happiness.
Even blindfolded, he still remembered me.
Then he smiled and added, "And there...

"What if she finds out the baby she suffered so much to conceive is actually ours? Will she lose her mind?"

My stepsister giggled, snuggling into my husband’s embrace.

I stood outside the cracked door, completely frozen.

My husband was holding her tight, enthusiastically picking out names for the baby growing in my belly.

My own mother scoffed from the side. "Relax. That idiot will never f...

My fiancé and I got engaged, then he joined an academic project in another state that required him to stay for a year.

I agreed to wait for him to come back and get married, with plans to see each other once a month.

But for the entire year, he found excuses every month to avoid seeing me.

Even when my mother was critically ill, I called him crying, but the phone always went to cold voicemail.
...

I spent twenty years being invisible. Twenty years making his favorite meals, raising his daughter, loving his family like my own.

On our anniversary, I baked a cake for six hours. He came home and ripped diamond earrings from my ears—they were for his mistress, not me.

My daughter rolled her eyes: "I wish Victoria was my mom."

My five-year-old grandson looked at me with disgust: "You're old...

I spent ten years keeping our severely allergic son alive and gave up my award-winning career to support my husband.
My reward? My son killed my unborn baby, and my husband labeled me "mentally ill."
Dr. Steve Harrington, the brilliant psychiatrist, thought he was a genius.
He secretly used me as a lab rat for his experimental detachment therapy, trying to wipe away my "paranoid jealousy" so he ...

Adrian Whitmore used to call me obsessive whenever I asked where he had been with my best friend. Then I lost our baby, stopped asking, and moved into the guest room. That was when the husband who had spent years pushing me away finally cornered me and demanded to know why I no longer cared.

My son needed $500,000 to survive the night. My husband is a billionaire. The money never came.
Kieran Hale never signed off on our son's treatment. That call belonged to his chief of staff. Liora wanted forms, signatures, a second opinion. When I phoned Kieran from the hospital hallway, begging, he told me to do what Liora said.
Caspian died while I was still filling out paperwork.
I buried him w...

I planned to give up on life.
Then I heard a cat yelling at a dog.
"Stop being so stubborn, meow! You will die!"
Wait, I can hear them?
Naturally, I bought the dog.
I spent my life savings—twenty dollars—to save a Golden Retriever who apparently curses in dog language.
We just make sense together: a broken human eating crushed instant ramen, and a broken dog deciding to protect her anyway.
I ...

That December night, his first love and I were both rushed to the ER.
Two pregnant women. One operating room.
My doctor husband took three seconds to decide.
"She's an athlete. She can handle it," he told the nurse, then wheeled Sienna into surgery.
Leaving me—eight months pregnant with his baby—bleeding alone in the hallway.
When the nurse called begging him to come back, he said: "I'm at the pha...

I was at my favorite artist's concert, phone up, recording the Kiss Cam segment. My boyfriend Mason said he was three hours away having dinner at his parents' house and couldn't make it, even sent me a selfie as proof.

Then the Kiss Cam found him.

On the giant screen, Mason wore the exact same gray vintage rock tee and black ripped jeans from his "family dinner photo," his arm around a blonde gi...

"She endured hardships with you back then just for your current net worth of a billion dollars. You must use the absolute 50/50 treatment to cure the 'poverty disease' in her bones."

After my husband's childhood friend Chloe returned from abroad, she brainwashed my husband, Ethan.

From then on, he demanded we split everything 50/50. Whether it was eating, sleeping, or doing household chores, eve...

At the Met Gala, I heard my husband tell his friends in French that I'm "boring." That his 22-year-old girlfriend is "so much more exciting in bed."

He laughed when they asked if I knew. "Elle ne comprend même pas 'bonjour'." (She doesn't even understand 'bonjour'.)

What Marcus doesn't know: I spent two years at the Sorbonne.

Je comprends tout, Marcus. I understand everything.

The diamond ...

He let his new designer shred my $3 million dress at our engagement party. He thought I’d forgive him like I always did. He didn’t know I was the one funding his company.
Ethan Cole thinks he’s marrying a fallen heiress with no one to turn to. Chloe thinks she’s the next great designer. Neither of them ever bothered to ask about my mother’s family name: Moretti.
They humiliated me in front of two ...

Seven years of marriage turned me into a joke.

My husband Christopher would drive across half of New York in a blizzard just to bring my sister Amanda a cup of mulled wine. My own son Ryan would point at my face and scream, "Aunt Amanda is a hundred times prettier than you! She should be my mom!"

In this house, the three of them were family. I was just the unpaid help.

I thought if I loved them...