Chapter 3Rich From My Hundredth Divorce

The truth is, the very first time I found out Tim was cheating on me—the first time he demanded a divorce so he could marry his mistress—I fought it. I fought hard.

Tim was the one who chased me. He didn't care that I was an orphan with nothing to my name. He didn't care that I didn't come from a legacy family. He spent four years of college pursuing me relentlessly.

After graduation, to prove he wanted to marry me, he knelt outside his mother's study in their Upper East Side townhouse for three entire days.

Eventually, his mother called me in for a meeting. She didn't mince words.

"The Vanderbilt men," she said, her voice like chilled glass, "are incapable of fidelity. It is a genetic rot. He has his father's exact temperament. I am not refusing this marriage to protect him. I am doing it to protect you."

Her gaze drifted to the antique, centuries-old molding of the study. Her tone grew heavy with the ghosts of the women who came before us. "Girl... I do not want to watch another flower wither away inside the walls of this house."

She was sincere. But I was young, and I was so incredibly stupid. I thought my love was the exception. How could Tim be like them?

This was the boy who would wake up at dawn just to bring me hot coffee in bed. The man who abandoned multi-million-dollar board meetings just to sit with me because I had a mild fever.

Young girls are so easily snared by those fleeting moments of intense, cinematic devotion. We mistake grand gestures for a safe harbor, and by the time we realize we're drowning, we're too far from the shore.

I wasn't lying to the realtors earlier. That first divorce destroyed me. Standing in the middle of the penthouse we had decorated together, my heart felt like it was being ripped through my ribcage.

I knew, even then, that even if it was just a phase, even if we eventually found our way back to each other, the betrayal had carved a canyon in my chest. It was a wound that would never fully close. One touch, and I would bleed out all over again. You can't just tie a severed string back together and pretend the knot isn't there.

But knowing the truth doesn't make leaving any easier. I couldn't let go.

On the night he proposed to his first mistress, I snapped.

I took a blade to my wrists in our marble bathroom.

Watching the crimson pool on the pristine white tiles, a sudden, pathetic wave of desperation hit me. I just wanted a crumb of affection from the man who had discarded me. I reached for my phone with bloody fingers and dialed his number.

It rang and rang and rang before he finally picked up.

"Cora. Didn't I tell you not to contact me until the papers are finalized?" His voice was thick with annoyance. "Stop causing scenes. Just be a good girl. I'll come find you when the novelty wears off."

"Don't make me angry, Cora, or I really will leave you for good."

"Tim... I..."

My voice was a ragged, wet whisper. I wanted to beg him not to leave me behind. I wanted him to come home.

He caught the terrifying weakness in my breath. He paused. Then, his voice dropped to a glacial sneer.

"What now? Faking an illness to guilt-trip me? Stop being so damn pathetic, Cora."

The line went dead.

I lay there, the cold seeping into my bones, and in that agonizing silence, something inside me crystallized. I didn't want to die. I wasn't the one who broke our vows. I wasn't the one who threw away our life. Why the hell should I be the one bleeding out on a bathroom floor?

I managed to dial 911.

When I woke up in the stark, sterile hospital room, the space beside my bed was empty and cold. That was the moment my love for Tim Vanderbilt finally died. I decided, right then and there, that I would leave him and never, ever look back.

But that was also the moment it happened.

As I hovered in that liminal space between life and death, a voice—cold, mechanical, and entirely divorced from reality—echoed in my skull. It called itself the 100-Divorce Protocol.

It laid out a cosmic, inescapable bargain: Survive, but only if I completed one hundred divorces from Tim. If I failed, if I walked away before the quota was met, the death I had just escaped would reclaim me.

I tried to refuse. I had just accepted death, hadn't I? Why should I be afraid?

“Because the death I give you will not be a quiet fading,” the voice had whispered in my mind. “It will be violent. It will be agonizing. And there will be nothing left of your beauty.”

It knew my vanity. I could accept dying. I couldn't accept being butchered.

So, I made the deal.