Seven Years, Three Broken Hearts

Seven years ago, Clara Vance signed a contract with Eleanor Sterling: marry her son Damian, and the Sterling family would pay for her dying father George Vance’s medical care. For six months Damian cherished her, until he found the agreement in his mother’s study and decided her love had been a calculated scam.

He shoved her into his desk, costing her their first child; locked her out in freezing rain, costing her the second. Now three months pregnant with their third, Clara endures his parade of other women in silence. At the Sterling Charity Gala she finds him tangled with Bianca Frost, who shoves her into a marble table. Standing in her own blood as Damian tosses a black Amex into the puddle, Clara finally says it is time to end it.

Bianca’s whisper exposes the truth before the city’s elite, and Clara walks out alone into the night.